Is it possible to have wildlife-friendly hanging baskets?

On a recent trip to the Royal Horticultural Society's Wisley gardens in Surrey, I was pleased to see their trial of wildlife-friendly hanging baskets.

Before I show you the pictures, remember this is late autumn - they were not looking their best!

In fact, let's start you off with their information board about it all, to show you how seriously they have been taking it:

You can see that their focus has been on trying to make hanging baskets that are good for bees, because the sad thing is that most of the plants sold for hanging baskets have been so selectively bred that they retain no value at all for pollinating insects - no nectar, no pollen, just a load of promise in the form of bright petals and nothing to show for it.

It means that scenes like this (in this case in a windowbox rather than a hanging basket) are devoid of life (even if very beautiful, here on my hotel balcony when I visited the Dolomites).

So what the RHS has been trying are two main bee-friendly plants.

The first is Bacopa, which used to have the Latin name Sutera but is now called Chaenostoma, just to confuse everyone.

As I say, looking a little bit tired, and I didn't see any bees on themwhen I was there but that's not to say they hadn't been working on sunnier or more summery days.

The other plant they were trialling was Bird's-foot Trefoil, our lovely little native grassland plant that you may know of as Eggs-and-Bacon.

Now these has totally gone over, leaving just the 'birds' feet' seedpods, but showing just how many flowers must have been in bloom at their peak.

What I'm really interested in is whether any of you have managed to create wildlife-friendly hanging baskets or window boxes. For many people, it is the sum total of their growing space. It would be lovely to think there is something that people could grow in them that will look good and do wonders for wildlife, rather than something that might as well be plastic.