The Plants Come In: 10 Nordic Pieces for Indoor Greenery

The Plants Come In: 10 Nordic Pieces for Indoor Greenery

The first frost warning comes in the last week of October, and everything that spent the summer outside has to be carried in. The pelargoniums, the fig in its heavy pot, the herbs still producing but with a week left in them. They arrive in the state they left in: plastic liners, cracked clay, a green crust on the outside, and nowhere for water to go now that it is being poured on a wooden floor rather than a stone step.

October is the practical moment to sort that out. A plant brought in now spends five months in low light with its roots in a warm, dry flat, so it wants a pot that fits, a saucer that catches, and a watering can small enough to encourage restraint. These ten pots and cans are active and in stock in the UK, Germany, Norway and Denmark, and every one of them can be compared across the shops on ScandiDeals.

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1. Bergs Potter Københavner Flower Pot – Clay that outlives the plant

Start with the pot that will still be here in ten years. The Bergs Potter Københavner flower pot is thrown in a chalky pale pink clay, eighteen centimetres across, with a rolled rim and a row of small scallops beneath it. The shape is the classic nursery pot, tapering gently to a narrow foot. Eighteen centimetres is the size a supermarket plant goes into when it leaves its plastic liner, which makes this the most useful pot in the flat.

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2. ERNST Plant Pot – Fluted stone, raw clay foot

The ERNST plant pot is fourteen centimetres in both directions, fluted from rim to base like a short column, and glazed in a mottled grey that pools darker in the grooves. The glaze stops before the bottom and leaves a wide band of raw sandy clay, which is the detail that keeps it from looking like a bathroom accessory. Fourteen centimetres is herb size. Three of them along a kitchen windowsill, holding the parsley and thyme that came in from outside, make the sill look deliberate rather than rescued.

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3. Cooee Design Twist Plant Pot – A spiral you see sideways

Not every plant needs a statement. The Cooee Design Twist plant pot is a straight cylinder twelve centimetres across, in a matte sand glaze with a shallow twist turning through the surface. In flat light it reads as plain; when low winter sun comes in at an angle the spiral appears. It takes a small nursery pot inside, which is the simplest way to keep a fussy plant alive: water it at the sink, let it drain, drop it back in.

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4. Rörstrand Ostindia Plant Pot – Blue flowers, rust-line rim

The Rörstrand Ostindia plant pot carries the blue East India drawing over a pale body with a faint blue-grey cast, finished with a thin rust-coloured line around the rim. Seventeen centimetres across and thirteen high, it suits a plant that sits somewhere formal: a hall table, a desk, the middle of a dining table once the summer flowers have gone. The pattern is busy, so give it something plain and green.

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5. Moomin Arabia Moomin Haru Plant Pot – A Moomin among the flowers

Children's rooms get the plants that ask for least. The Moomin Arabia Moomin Haru plant pot is white, thirteen and a half centimetres across, drawn right round in fine cobalt line work: meadow flowers, grasses and a Moomin lying among them. The drawing rewards close looking, which is more than most children's pieces manage. Give it something sturdy, a spider plant or a small succulent, and it becomes the plant a child actually remembers to water.

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6. OYOY Nami Pot with Saucer – The saucer is the point

The OYOY Nami pot with saucer answers the problem every plant creates indoors: water on a wooden floor. Its saucer comes with it, wave-edged and a little wider than the pot, in the same glossy amber glaze. Twenty-one and a half centimetres is a proper size, for a monstera or a rubber plant that has outgrown the windowsill. The amber is warm against grey light and turns almost honey-coloured once the lamps go on at four.

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7. Muuto Ridge Flower Pot – Oval, so it sits against a wall

The Muuto Ridge flower pot is not round. It is an oval, finely ridged from top to bottom in an off-white glaze, twenty-four centimetres across the wide axis and much shallower through the other. The shape is the argument: against a wall, on a narrow shelf or a window ledge, it uses the length it has and does not push out into the room. The ridges catch what light there is, which gives a plain white object something to do.

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8. Broste Copenhagen Sonja Flower Pot – A column for the floor

The Broste Copenhagen Sonja flower pot stands fifty-five centimetres high: four rounded lobes fused into one glossy brown column. It is a cover pot in the strict sense, so the plant stays in its liner and drops into the opening at the top, which means the leaves begin at waist height and the whole arrangement can be moved without a trowel. Floors are the coldest surface in a Nordic flat by December, and lifting a plant half a metre off one does it a favour.

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9. Eva Solo Globe Watering Can – Round body, long neck

Most watering cans live under the sink because they are ugly. The Eva Solo Globe watering can does not need to: a white, almost spherical body with the handle moulded into the top as a single loop, and a long spout tapering to a fine mouth. It pours slowly, which is what indoor watering wants, since soil in a warm flat takes water badly when it all arrives at once. Left on a shelf beside the plants it looks like an object rather than a chore.

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10. Stelton Original Watering Can – A spout that reaches the soil

The Stelton Original watering can holds a little under two litres in a soft black cylinder, with a thin wire handle that folds down and a spout long enough to pass between leaves and reach the soil underneath. That distance earns its keep from November, when wet foliage in a closed, heated room is where most houseplant trouble starts. The capacity is modest on purpose. Plants need less water in winter than people give them, and a small can makes that easier to remember.

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Final Thoughts

Houseplants fail in a Nordic winter for ordinary reasons: too much water, too little light, roots left standing in the overflow. Almost none of it is solved by buying more plants. It is solved by the dull equipment around them, a pot of the right size, a saucer underneath, a can that pours slowly and holds little, and by accepting that a plant between November and February is resting rather than growing.

That is the Scandinavian argument applied to a windowsill: fewer things, chosen properly, kept for years. Fired clay and glazed stoneware outlast every plant that passes through them. All ten pieces here are in stock in the UK, Germany, Norway and Denmark, and the same pot can differ more than you would expect between shops and between regions, so it is worth comparing on ScandiDeals before the plants come in for good.