How to Make a Flower Pot in Minecraft and What Fits in It

Put 3 bricks in a V shape on a crafting table: one in the left slot and one in the right slot of a row, and the third in the middle slot of the row below. You get 1 flower pot. The recipe is the same on Java and Bedrock.

Use the brick item (the one you smelt from clay), not brick blocks. Pots can also turn up as loot: village masons sometimes have them in their chests, and brushing suspicious gravel in trail ruins can give one.

Getting bricks

Bricks come from smelting clay balls in a furnace, one clay ball per brick. Clay is in shallow water, on river beds and in lush caves, and each clay block breaks into 4 balls, so a single block of clay covers a pot with one ball to spare. Our clay guide covers where to find it and how to make it renewable, and the bricks guide covers the smelting.

What you can put in a flower pot

Hold the plant and use it on an empty pot. These fit:

• Flowers: dandelion, golden dandelion (since Java 26.1 / Bedrock 26.10), poppy, blue orchid, allium, azure bluet, all four tulips, oxeye daisy, cornflower, lily of the valley, wither rose, torchflower, and open or closed eyeblossom
• Saplings: oak, spruce, birch, jungle, acacia, dark oak, cherry, pale oak and poplar, plus mangrove propagules and both azaleas
• Mushrooms and fungi: red and brown mushrooms, crimson and warped fungus, crimson and warped roots
• Others: fern, dead bush, cactus and bamboo

Two-block-tall plants (sunflowers, lilacs, rose bushes, peonies, tall grass) don’t fit, and neither does short grass.

A potted plant never grows. Saplings stay saplings forever and cactus doesn’t hurt you. That makes pots the easy way to show off a cherry sapling or a wither rose without the wither rose damaging anything.

To take a plant out, use the pot with an empty hand. To swap it, take the old one out first; using a pottable item on a filled pot does nothing.

Placement on Java and Bedrock

This is where the editions differ:

• Java: a flower pot can go on top of almost any block, including fences, walls, slabs and stairs.
• Bedrock: a flower pot needs a full top face below it, or the top of a fence, wall or hopper. It can also sit on a closed trapdoor, but it breaks if the trapdoor opens.

Pots get knocked off by flowing water and pistons, dropping the pot and the plant as items. Lava destroys them outright.

Decorating with them

Pots are small, so they look best in groups or set into furniture. A few ideas that work in most builds:

• Put a pot on a fence post or a wall for a little table lamp shape, with a red mushroom or torchflower on top.
• Line a windowsill with potted saplings in different woods.
• Hang a cactus pot on a shelf of trapdoors in a desert house.

The beginner building ideas page has more small details like these. You’ll also see pots in the wild: a swamp witch hut always has one with a red mushroom, and igloo basements keep a potted cactus.