If your favorite terra cotta or antique pot breaks, don't despair. You can still use it in the landscape. Beautiful urn-shaped or "olla" water jars with a fluted neck can be reused as artistic planting elements. Even if you're missing half the pot, what remains is still beautiful.
The trick for reusing them is to actually plant the broken pot into your garden soil. Place it on its side, broken part down, so it appears naturally buried. Imagine coming upon it in the ruins of an ancient city. You can play around with the soil level around the mouth of the jar to get different looks. The most interesting effect is to make soil look like water being poured out. When you plant the mouth with ground-hugging annuals, for example, it looks like the flowers are flowing out of the water jar as well.
You can also use stones or rounded river gravel to create a stream bed to give the illusion of water, and perhaps add some small reed-like plants such as little acorus or blue fescue to enhance the suggestion. Use some larger grasses or interesting perennials near the pot to make it look less abrupt and more grounded in the landscape.
You can also use this concept as a means of hiding landscape lighting. Small high-intensity directional bullet lights aren't very attractive in the garden, but they are essential for nighttime beauty. You can hide a light fixture inside one of these half-ollas with the mouth and light aimed at the desired lighting subject.
Sometimes it's the bottom of the pot that breaks. Those with an open mouth, like traditional flowerpots, make very useful problem solvers. If they have a beautiful scalloped edge or with decoration in relief, all the better. We love plants such as dwarf bamboo and horsetail, but these tend to become rather invasive. Use the broken pot for a buried root-control device by sinking it in the hole to just below the rim. Then fill with soil and plant your bamboo inside. The pot won't decompose and keeps surface roots from traveling.
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