Window Box Doldrums

 

Why do I feel like a wastrel when lying abed on a sunny Sunday afternoon, nose to book, and somehow industrious when doing the same while basted and splayed out at the beach?  

This has nothing to do with the subject at hand, yet again renovating the window boxes, but it's a stuck thought that needed to shake lose.

Note the pink geraniums in the lead photo. These are fake.Geraniums, as you may or may not know, do not do well in 90 degree weather. They stay green, even flourish in their greenness, but are hard pressed to put out more than a measly flower or two between June and September -- at least in the tropical heat that smothers Washington, DC each summer. 

And so, we make do. The Prince and I took a highly organized trip to the Maryland suburbs yesterday, first to the fantasia that is Homestead Gardens to look for pond plants, then to Michael's for fake flowers, then to Pet Whatsis for a dozen feeder fish* for the pond.

We're late with the fish business since our little garden again became an aviary this spring with successive bird births and if the pond is not covered during this period, well, tragedy inevitably ensues. 

Of course, tragedy also occurs with fish, when one allows one's prince to tend to one's pond--though I am never one to assess blame.

So here we are in July and the five frontal boxes look good, if a little dull, with small leafed ivy dripping over the sides and green potato vine beginning to cascade down the front, but there's little of natural color -- just pops of purple wandering jew, some no-account coleus, and several experiments that are a complete waste of water. My red fauxberries are doing fine, as one would expect of fakes.

Here:

Fine, but a little dull

 Michael's supplied the following -- a couple of bunches of pink geraniums, and some little purple stuffs and these pink nubbins. All at 70% off -- so for like 6 bucks, replenishment. Dirt cheap is FINE for this sort of job, just look for reasonably natural colors  -- and don't fret the leaves, rip them off if they're too tacky. These blooms are about to borrow from reality.

The trick to effective fakery is to break the bunches apart so individual florets can be cleverly dropped into appropriate locations -- like next to the actual doing nothing geraniums, thusly:

Not Enough

  

Now one steps back and says -- NOT ENOUGH -- and sticks a few more stems in. And voila!

Repeat process with howevermany boxes you have and done. If one were really anal, one would move the flowers about each week as if they're actually blooming. One is not. 
  
*Feeder fish are what I suppose pet shops consider junk. Variously colored and frequently quite pretty, they are served to snakes and whatnots; lagniappes before the rodent course. They happen to be cheap. I bought a dozen for $3. And if the Prince doesn't do these in, they'll grow to impressive size, live for years, and be just as uninterested in me as those fancy koi the racoons got.

The Winter Window Box Again - A Stroke of Luck

While the backyard is full of them, I didn't buy pansies for the window boxes this fall.

I have a Springtime habit of  overstuffing the five boxes that suspend from the front windows. Installing pansies would have required prematurely uprooting or discarding basics like the massive drips of potato vines that had reached Rapunzel lengths,  the hot pink geraniums that revived with the first cool blasts of fall, and frills like the bits of wandering jew that had grown from  exclamation points poked into the boxes in April to substantial flourishes.

Besides, I needed to find room for the tiny cabbages (!) I picked up at the Raleigh Farmer's Market when I visited Baby in North Carolina this past November.

Garden snobs sniff on, but cabbages delight me, the colors, the textures, the feel of a birthday card when you're five years old and the bunnies hop hop down the yellow path with blue birds and butterflies winging overhead and daisies and zinnias dotting the psycadelically green grass...all cabbages need is a little glitter. (mmmmmmmmm thinking glitter. That's an aside.)


I feel I must here reinforce my curmudgeonly creds: I don't like photos of cats, bunnies, or babies. In fact I don't particularly like kids (other than MY Baby)-- unless they're strange, or have froggy voices, or are at least a little weird looking. That's enough for today.  

One last thought about the cabbages, since I think this post is about petunias, finding them small -- in six packs, no less -- for ONE DOLLAR EACH -- was a halleluja event. Full size cabbages are not only ridiculously expensive, they bolt too quickly in this warmish climate, shooting up leggy bits that disorder the pretty clump. They are also difficult to plant in window boxes because of their large root balls (which don't take kindly to trimming, by the way). Plant full sized cabbages and you can have little else, which  doesn't at all suit me.

After two months they are now the perfect size, by four they'll start to become unlovely, but it will be Spring and time for a cycle of something else.

So now that the cold has dropped over us like an icy shroud, and I contemplate the immediate loss of whatever in the boxes has so far survived and find myself hungry for the color and cheer of pansies.

As luck would have it, Maggie and Gary are leaving today for half a world cruise, a month on a ship that will leave from New York and eventually pitch up in Australia where they'll spend another month exploring.

What I get out of this -- in one of those mom and dad went to Hawaii and all I got is this stupid t-shirt events -- is four 4-packs of pansies from her terrace that she never got around to planting. Oh, and two avocado plants rooting in a glass jar, but that's neither here nor there.

I toted them home last night and sat a pack in each corner of the two lower boxes and find I am delighted with the way they look -- hoisting up the rear of the display in a way they ordinarily would not.  In past years I've tucked them on either side of whatever I've got going on as a centerpiece, which means they're usually obscured by adjacent foliage.

While I don't know about maintaining them in the shallow soil of the plastic containers,  I'm delighted with the composition (although I expect those last waggling leaves of a purple wandering jew to be a black sog by tomorrow -- finally, a frost!). 

I need to containerize them in such a way that they retain the lift, but don't require near daily fussing followed by near certain death.

Small pots would do I think and might be unearthed from my charming potting area under the back porch, feel free to fantasize while I move a spare tire and the rusted saw blades. Among other things.

But how much more interesting would it be to employ a little creative reuse of stuff more immediately to hand -- a line of thinking that reminds me of gardens and window boxes at a recent Philadelphia Flower Show, where various non sequiturs became part of the displays.

I have plenty of oddments lying about, and if I was feeling a little more energetic I'd photograph them nicely against a black backdrop so they sparkle. But I'm not, so I'll just say that on a quick inventory of household objets that I just did between the keyboard and the kitchen there is the concrete thingamabob doing nothing on the fireplace hearth that sits next to a copper urn that is likewise under-employed, and the three glass lamp shades that are for some reason sitting on the kitchen counter (which probably have to do with a Princely project - but I could just look blank and say "I dunno" when he asks where they went), and the trio of long-stemmed, pink and green Mexican wine glasses that are never in use, and a few silvery bowls with sufficient depth ....

Off to play.

Raising the Dead

The corpses of Christmas past march forlornly down the streets, waiting for the trash truck.  Block after block they lie scorned, when just days ago they were lovingly decorated and tastefully white-lit -- or tarted up with tinsel and colored bulbs (but never mind those).

How about a second coming?

Consider the winter window box (that's one of mine above). Much of the filler is branches of pine and fir scavenged from the street to flounce down the front, replacing the summer potato vine, and stand tall at the rear to give oomph to the cabbages and berries that are the main show.

Another box, a neighboring street, a more modest display-- but charming, I think. Like a spot-colorized black and white photo. Here, sprigs of green form a  nest for pine cones. Given the winter chill (I hesitate to say cold since we're still wearing sweaters in mid-January) the greens should stay nicely at least into February.

It's so mild here that the roses are still in somewhat straggly bloom. If you hadn't thought of pansies and cabbages and ivy and such -- winter mode for your boxes -- and need something to punctuate the greens, the last of the roses would do nicely.

Stick them (or any other flower that's malingering in the garden) in those plastic rose/corsage water holders with the stabby bases and poke them about.


 
When the tree branches brown, as they sadly must, there's plenty else to replace them that's either free or reasonably cheap, for instance a snow storm of baby's breath.

For scavenged color without fuss, branches of holly do very nicely just stuck in the soil -- big ones for a lush back-drop, twigs if you've got greenery already in place or simply massed upright to fill the entire box.

Rhododendron and magnolia leaves mix well with berries but can also stand alone. Or combine them with cypress or yews for a shaggy drip over the edges, maybe adding a scented filler of rosemary and some tangled branches of witch hazel or bittersweet and rose hips for punctuation. Maybe toss in a camellia or two (in those water holders) just...because.

Needless to say, if you don't grow these plants you can steal them (on moonless nights) from your neighbor. 

Window Boxes Redux Redux

As I've waddled through my two-year evaluation, and it looks like I'm going to live, at least for the time being, and I'm boring myself silly with monitoring my blood pressure and deciding whether to take pills in the morning or evening or some here and some there -- how quickly we have shifted from thug to pansyass -- I guess I'll rev up the Gaga and....

Love Gaga.

Shit. Now I'm having trouble sitting still. Oh right, I was going to resume writing, not jigging about. Much has happened since my last entry that I will not go into beyond a summary: weddings and trips and holidays and getting paid for writing, which is always nice.

Zo. The post-Thanksgiving window boxes have been decorated and they are even less natural than usual. Little besides the ivy draping over the corners, and the fringe of wandering jew that will linger only until frost, has roots. The rest, as always, is a mix of the finest Chinese plastic and various mystery products, a sprinkling of glitter, and branches pinched from trees and shrubs as filler. It's all tied up with big purple bows.  

Tradescantia Pallida - Mind the Gaps

I just flipped through 42 googlets on the care and feeding and propagation of the wandering jew, the plant least likely to require any instructions whatsoever. There were many more but even though I am in FULL PROCRASTINATION MODE, I was getting bored.

I have been growing tradescantia pallida (as it's more haughtily called) since 1972 (or thereabouts) when Stan and Betty Gottlieb gave me a sprig snipped on a trip to Jamaica or Trinidad or Aruba.  I stuck it in one of the many potted avocado plants that lined the windowsill of the New York apartment I shared with my husband once removed (The Pre-Prince) and it grew.

Avocado plants raised from pits (stick a couple of toothpicks in the sides and balance on a glass of water until roots emerge) do not fruit. They are useful as screens however, in this case softening an unglamorous view of Columbus Avenue, and as starter plants for budding gardeners since the process is so stupidly simple and....transparent. 

Twee

In someone's eyes this garden is a twinkle. Could it be the result of a homeowner with a craving for acres of space? It is such a small wedge of a corner plot; and such a grand example of twee. 

Arch and Outhouse

A gravel path lined with neatly tended miniature succulents wends its way through the tableau, passing tiny stone mushrooms and fallen pillars and a little fountain planted with bits of green stuff and finally arriving at a frilly white metal arch, besides which sits an outhouse. Perhaps for a visiting fairy that can't depend on her Depends.  

The Cafe

Tucked back a bit, a dwarf fir tree forms the backdrop for a doll-house sized cafe table and chairs. Maybe that's why the fairy needs a latrine.

The Holidays are Over

One has to restart the blogging somewhere, and window box renewal is as good a place as any.  For the past three months I've been sitting here with my feet on the desk ignoring the spring bulbs (the red tulips were gorgeous) and the flowering of the cherry (the annual show is increasingly spectacular) and suddenly the mock orange is about to bloom so...

I am feeling particularly self-congratulatory since I have spent a grand total of $25 (plus tax) to plant out the five boxes this year.

The hot pink geraniums wintered over in my solarium-winter garden - aviary (yes! new news!) along with purple and variegated wandering jew. Ivy fills the box corners year 'round and I left my little cheats -- the fauxberries and such which will cheer the boxes when I forget to water and/or something drops dead.

So my only purchase was five green potato vines to grow front and center in each box; vines that given some months and absolutely minimal care will swag the front of the house in a poison green ruffle of leaves. 

While I rarely flack products I am called to do so because I recently received this item called a CobraHead Weeder (www.cobrahead.com) which is the niftiest tool in my gardening arsenal. I got it for free because a few months ago I became a member of the Garden Writers Association (an event that caused me to immediately stop writing about gardens). However, as this tool offset somewhat my dues, I was happy to receive it and use it and so now guilt-driven I am mentioning it.

But I would NOT mention it if it wasn't damn good.  The pointy end of the thing, which I guess would be the cobra's snout, made amazingly quick work of turning the window box soil. It was so easy I had to remind myself that this is usually a sweaty chore, what with the tangle of old roots and rocks and oddities inserted to discourage pigeons and encourage moisture and whatnot -- all of it congealed into a rather unyielding mass after a winter of sitting there being largely fake and therefore unwatered.

If you go to their website there's a how to video showing the tool in action.

I would show you mine if I had had the foresight to make one.

Boxes by Twilight

The Newly Bedecked and Lighting the Night

Holiday Decking

My prince is getting antsy about the holidays. Promising a full Martha Stewart on the window boxes was a way of getting them back on their ledges, meanwhile suspending what has become a painting DEBACLE (that we will NOT get into) that involves his keeping employed a -- never mind, I did just say I wasn't getting into it and I can feel the blood pressure rising. Suffice it to say, NEVER employ a...writer to paint a house. And that is my final word on the subject (possibly).

So I renovated the window boxes on Sunday afternoon, he hauling down from the attic my cartons of odds and ends, me then playing in the dirt. Little about the the winter boxes is real. If I were more organized I would take before and after photos...showing you in shot after constructive shot how these dirt filled boxes with just a spill of ivy off the sides*, are magically transformed with the help of a pile of fake or once alive crap combined with a bit of glitz and white lights.


You will note the (fake) boxwood ball in the center is one I ordered on-line (while listening to Alejandro) several weeks ago.  It's stuck on a sturdy stick to get it above the rest of the shrubbish and promises to do exactly what I want it to do. Stay green and look alive.

In the front are some fir branches, clipped from Suzanne's trees over Thanksgiving weekend. The red berries that resemble red berries but are some kind of Chinese substance were stuck in last Christmas and never removed. They were too jolly to pull, somehow looking right even in midsummer nestled among the (real) pink geraniums. The rest of it is gilded pine cones, a couple of gold ornaments, and a big purple bow with glittered and wired edges that twist this way and that.  The bow more or less matches the color of the boxes, which are painted the same purple as the front door.

The body of the house, though it looks icy gray, is actually (mostly) a lively shade of spring green with a line of pale pink circling the windows and reappearing in the frieze along the roof line.. or PARTLY doing so because an unfortunate facet of having hired a writer to paint the damn house is that addition to the house itself not being entirely the sames shade (and it will probably always be at least two colors because that's the way things go around here) the damn frieze coloring is all ferkoct --half this color and half that. Idiot. STOP!

And because of this delay -- these months waiting to have one small flat fronted brick house painted and having a snively writer framed in the second floor windows across the hall from my office like a peeping tom jack-in-the-box at whatever time of day he was uninspired to write and more inspired to dab a little paint on the windows (while listening to NPR and chattering on his cell phone)--there is not a damn pansy to be found and I aways have pansies on either side of whatever thing occupies the center.   
 
Of course there are white lights twisted throughout. And it is very pretty at night. It and its four siblings; there's another box on the main level and three upstairs.

Similarly duded up is the berry-free holly (the only kind I can keep alive) that sits beside the front door.

If it's not too cold tonight, and if I remember, and if the camera captures it, I'll post a photo.

*Except the left corner of this one particular box, which due to some tragedy or other lost its ivy last spring. The new branch, which has yet to achieve any significant presence, temporarily commingles with fake.

Near Instantanious Follow-up

Hot on the hoofs of the previous posting I ordered five of these 7 inchers (which i was assured are about the size of cantaloupes and will look divine stuffed into the center of the window boxes and covered in itty bitty white lights).

Off to find five sticks.

And Now! A Matching Backdrop for your Dumpster

Last year, at almost exactly this time, I wrote about a brilliant invention/construction of the divine Diana McLellan (who I seem to be devoting a lot of ink or type or whatnot/words to at present) -- a cunning trash can cover constructed of fake ivy.

Today, peering mournfully at my window boxes (picture Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands, this is just how I looked, minus a few clippers). ONCE AGAIN I have a death, or four to be precise. Five window boxes, four dead spikes. One survives and is so perky despite exactly the same care (or lack thereof) that I suspect it's a succubus (or plantibus) draining the energy from the others in the night.

Halloween is coming.

So, obviously and immediately it occurred that I must sit down at the computer, blast Alejandro, and research fake boxwood.

Somewhere very early on and a down a twisted trail in this blog is an entry about my window box/real boxwood miseries. And something about some wimpy fakes that I discovered and that are now tangled somewhere under the back porch.

How much easier it is to buy new. Isn't it? Besides there's more of a thrill in wresting something from a nice clean box vs wresting it from under a mud encrusted rubber boot.

Anyway, I plonked Fake Boxwood into Google and voila! I find a fake boxwood hedge on the blog of a kindred spirit named Megan who lives in Portland and says she is "afflicted with zone denial," living in zone 8 but planting like it's zone 9, which is a familiar affliction.

I realize this has nothing to do with a boxwood centerpiece for my window boxes. Nor does it have anything to do with Diana's fake ivy trash can cover--other than it all being fabulously and most genuinely fake, of which there is just too damn little in this world.

Anyway anyway, here's herself on her hedge:

 That’s right, a fake boxwood hedge

I’m not a big fan of boxwood, or hedges, or fake plants, but you put them all together, and you have a winner. (?) Or at least the MADesigns custom hedges were put to good use in the May 2008 Domino Magazine story about San Francisco designer Stephen Shubel’s new studio.

So I started thinking about all Stephen (I call him Stephen) and I have in common, and why I too should have a fake boxwood hedge. He buys some things at IKEA, I buy everything some things at IKEA. He has an eyesore chain link fence to cover up, I have an eyesore chain link fence. He is a rich San Francisco designer who can afford custom fake hedges and probably gets a discount because he’s in the biz, I… wait. OK, that’s where the similarities end. But it’s an interesting idea anyway."

 

Megan's very clever site is: www.nestmaker.com

Now back to my research............

Yet Another Minor Catastrophe

Exhibit "A"

Here is another example of how sometimes things work and sometimes they just do not.

You will note this pot of coleus and purple wandering Jew marked Exhibit "A". Nice and bushy, yes?

Some weeks back I pinched some sprigs of each from another planter in the garden and stuck them in this umbrella stand in plain soil. They rooted nicely with absolutely no care  and have clearly flourished.

Exhibit "B"

The following week I noticed a pot beside the pond (Exhibit B) where good things were no longer in evidence, so I snatched a few more twigs and stuck them in the dirt. Voila. Nice.

Encouraged, I stole a few cuttings from particularly interesting specimen on the way to Harris Teeter. I stuck these in a little glass vase and they're sitting, dense with roots, on the kitchen windowsill. 

So then I come across a fabulous window box in Georgetown, filled most splendidly with coleus. And upon returning home I noticed a limpishness about my own boxes, and I thought of the pots and how easy it was to root this stuff, so I plucked and I planted and I even dipped the little stemlets in rooting powder to give them a leg up, as it were. I even watered!!


Maybe it was that? The damned attention?

Window Box Emergency Surgery

This has not been the best year for my window boxes. The potato vine has taken off most grandly--those in the lower boxes are brushing the porch floor and the upstairs boxes drip nearly to the tops of the downstairs windows.

Not My House

The geraniums, however, are being stubborn, waiting for cooler weather when they will begin blooming magnificently ... just in time to be yanked for the winter. What's most colorful are the red berry branches that I stuck in last Christmas. As they're phony, this stands to reason. 

The window boxes in these first two photos are -- gallingly -- not mine. I came upon them yesterday while cruising Georgetown for a parking space. Well, technically, Alice was cruising and I was staring out the window. This made it possible, when we came across this house on 32nd Street, near where it intersects with Q, for her to pull over any whichwhere and me to hop out and take pictures with no fear of gendarme interactions.

Not My House Either

These boxes are fabulous, if stupidly simple. There ain't much else here but common begonia and caladium. But the effect is spectacular.

I imagine they get more water than mine do, since there's not much of a roof overhang to shield them.

Oh, who am I fooling. Clearly, someone takes care of the damn things, cheaply planted (sniff) as they are.

Lift Up Thine Eyes!

You see it all the time in Europe, but too rarely here, roofs and porch tops lined with tubs and pots, all dripping with greens and flowers to soften the building edges. 

Plenty of our office buildings could use such treatment.

There's a large and boring red brick office building on Capitol Hill that happens to have a fourth floor balcony that runs rectangularly across the front. Its only decoration is a flag hoisted at one corner, that gives a jaunty billow whenever there's a breeze. But when there's a breeze here it's generally accompanied by rain, or a soon to be rain, so the potential observer is most likely jaunting off for cover.

I notice the flag perhaps twice a year, though I pass it most every day.

This is the first time I've ever thought about it, I think. Certainly it's the first time I've ever written about it--or, for that matter, the building, which, to move this right along, would look lovely with boxes along the edge of the balcony, spewing a profusion of something, anything, green.

And maybe a flower or two?

Rite of Spring

The pansies are lying limp-dicked in the window boxes, a situation that created a not small amount of tension between me and the prince last night.

We were sitting on the sofa watching the boys perform on American Idol, (also the source of several other arguments though we'll scarcely touch on them here) when during one of the interminable commercial breaks, he announced that Frager's, our local hardware store, had just received a shipment of spring plants. And not just Frager's, Home Depot had them in as well.

This is an annual announcement that I dread, because it heralds the beginning of the six weeks that preseed (oooh I like that spelling error!) the last frost date.

It's a period, like that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the stores are prematurely anticipating warmth and flowers and BBQ's and swimming and we're still huddled in down jackets half the time and hunting twigs from the streets to supplement the dwindled supply of firewood.

And each year my chosen one buys it, choosing to believe them over me. Oh bad move. So he will have to be carefully watched because it is now that he gets puffed with inspiration and starts meddling in my sandbox, moving the tropical plants out before it's safe and nudging me to get the still half-frozen garden ready for the mosquitoes. We now commence a period of intense and near constant aggravation when he will be frequently courting death.

So we begin.

Faking It in the Window Box

Some months ago, in a time between winter and spring, I featured myself in an article about window boxes for the Washington Post. Not that I mentioned it; they’re not hot on first person in the real estate section, which is where my stuff usually lands.

The issue was that I couldn't find a better example of an out of season window box than my own. So there it was (alongside several prize-winning specimens snapped at the Philadelphia Flower Show) a photo of one of the five boxes on the front of my house, wearing its wintry garb: corners dripping ivy, assorted dried shrubbish, and pansies surrounding –wait for it -- a fake boxwood centerpiece.
More...
For years now I’ve tried to get something permanent growing in the center of the boxes, which were installed over a decade ago. First there were real boxwood, clipped into perky balls. These looked particularly wonderful at Christmas, covered in tiny white lights. But they died.

I tried again the next year and worse happened, two of them dropped dead in late October, too late to be replaced and making a mess of the holiday display.

Then there was the year of the dwarf azalea, followed by several featuring spikes. The annual disasters were expensive and thoroughly irritating, though mostly my fault. I’m good with watering and feeding for the first few months and then get lazy, particularly with the upstairs boxes that are sheltered from rain.

Last fall, when the spikes I was trying again yellowed and drooped, I went on-line and hunted up fake boxwood, ordering five 12-inch specimens from a wedding supply vendor. (Who uses fake flowers in wedding displays, I ask you? And then I answer, That would probably be me, on one pretext or another).

12-inches seemed right, but there wasn’t enough stem to loft them into centerpieces, so I wired them onto chop sticks, which helped. They were also surprisingly skimpy things and required a lot of bending about to look fullish.

But they work, and as always with such things, no one notices.

The trick is to mix fake and real, and make sure the fakes are reasonably realistic. Plastic just will not do.

The fake should also be restrained to an accent, not dominate the box like they do in the skin-crawler pictured here, a display I had the misfortune to come across last week in Old Town, Alexandria. At a quick glance these fake peonies looked real, but they were so lush they demanded a closer look, which was their comeuppance.

Had one or two flowers been mixed with real ivy and potato vine, or some other mix drapey, bushy, and virtually unkillable things, they’d be witty—a touch of tromp l’loeil. On their own, a window box display of fake peonies (particularly in a window box where you can go nose to nose with them and sniff their counterfeit souls) is not just unimaginative, it's plain depressing.

I refuse to get into the two boxes full of plastic flowers that Pizzaria Uno currently displays at its Georgetown location. Shudder.

Cultivating Your Home's First Impression

When Alex Dencker, manager of Behnke Garden Center in Beltsville, put his red brick colonial in Silver Spring on the market late last summer, his window boxes exploded with crotons, creeping Jenny and New Guinea impatiens in blazing shades of red, orange and yellow.

Talk about curb appeal.

More...

"My real estate lady focused on this -- I thought she was nuts, but it really worked out. When people see your house for the first time, you have to make that bold first impression," he said, sounding thoroughly indoctrinated.

It paid off. The house sold in two weeks.

"Window boxes create a good impression from the start," said Dencker's agent, Tamara Kucik of W.C. and A.N. Miller's Silver Spring office. "When the buyer goes in the home, they're already excited."

Those "bland Colonials and Capes," so ubiquitous in the Washington area, are particularly needy candidates, she said. "Window boxes add an architectural element to the front of the house. ... It's a very simple way to add color." And the bigger the box, the better: "You have to have something that really catches the eye."

Window boxes are big sellers at Behnke, which carries them in wood, terra cotta, plastic, and composites that are lightweight, sturdy and cleverly mimic more elegant materials. Once they're filled and watered, Dencker cautioned, even lightweight boxes become lethally heavy, so make sure they're securely attached to the building or porch railing.

Starting a box to show well in early spring is tricky, but doable. Make sure whatever you select can survive frost: The average last frost date in the city is April 25, in the suburbs it's May 5.

"Generally, if plants are grown in a cold greenhouse, they will probably be fine planted out now," Dencker said. Behnke and other large garden centers in the area that raise their own plants have plenty of specimens to choose from. Loosestrife, coral bells and pansies "can take the cold with no problem," he said. Tuck in some English ivy and you have a splendid spring box.

"You can also do dried flowers, though I'd stay away from artificial plants," said horticulturist Karen Richards, who with her sisters, Donna and Cheryl, had a prize winner at this year's Philadelphia Flower Show, the world's largest indoor display.

"Cockscomb dries very well," she said. "Mix it with cattails and some small grasses for a fountain effect -- red fescue is drought tolerant -- and sunflowers. Oh, those nice sunny little faces with the purpley cockscomb," she added, in happy thought.

That combination of dried and real plants has an additional advantage for the harried -- or absentee -- home seller: It's a dramatic effect that requires little maintenance.

As the weather warms, and the pansies begin to grow leggy and fizzle, the replacement choices include reliably cheerful geraniums, petunias and impatiens, as well as anything that might grow in or ornament a box; Richard and her sisters included a tipsy martini glass in their flower show display.

Dencker is partial to tropicals. "Hibiscus and croton, with its broad striped leaves in orange and yellow, make a big, dramatic statement," he said, but don't dare plant them out until the temperature is reliably above 50 degrees.

He also likes the mosquito plant, which is "actually a geranium. Though the flowers are insignificant, it's bushy and has a nice lemony scent."

The balcony-size box that the Richards sisters created for the flower show featured such a profusion of flowers and greenery that it caused the knees to wilt: orchids, African violets, African daisies, two kinds of ivy, and a towering ficus anchoring the right corner.

Yes, you can try it at home. "Just keep in mind," Karen Richards cautioned, "if you're overloading the boxes, they take more maintenance. But you're selling, and you want that eye-popping color."

Dencker and Richards stress symmetry, balance and variety: making sure that you incorporate taller plants among the bushy ones and adding flowers or vines that cascade over the front of the box as well.

For a fast waterfall effect, "potato vines and hyacinth beans grow like crazy," Dencker said. And yellow creeping Jenny, "is a two-foot-long chain of gold by midsummer."

For height, consider adding a support and training those trailing vines upward. Or, as Dencker suggested, add dracaena spikes, which poke up like exclamation points among the bushier plantings.

"The outside of your home tends to be the last thing you work on," said Kucik, the real estate agent. "But it tells the buyer that you put in the time and the effort -- and that the inside will be fabulous."

Window boxes have a particularly powerful subliminal effect. "Not a lot of houses have them," she said. "So if you do, it tells people you've taken care of all the details. That you cherish your home."

Might they also distract from a trouble spot or two?

"Yes," she added, ever so delicately. "Giving them something nice to look at would mask a few flaws."

This article first appeared in the March 28, 2009 Washington Post

On Wintery Window Boxes

The following article first appeared in the Home section of the Washington Post. It was published in March of 1997, when I was deluded enough to believe I could keep my window boxes thriving winter after winter...

When I took my husband to London last year for his 50th birthday the last thing I expected was to be bowled over by window boxes. It was March after all, hardly peak garden season, but it was the only time of year when we could get away by ourselves. As expected, the gardens wouldn’t be in bloom for weeks, which made me weepy at the show I was going to miss. But if the earth was just beginning to come alive, nearly every building was a mass of color. Whole rooflines were dripping with foliage, iron railed balconies were massed with geraniums, stony terraces were draped in ivy. The window boxes, though, were the dazzlers. Most centered around neatly shaped boxwood, their fronts and sides lavished with ivy or vinca. Topping the green sprawl were marigolds, salvia, coleus, and fuscia.

Not only were these boxes lush, it was March, and they’d obviously been lush all winter.
More...

Since I’ve been struggling with window boxes for the last ten years, I did pause to consider if I was being a dreamer. My terra cotta planters were purchased on a jaunt to the country, and each year the mission has not been to get plants to do something splendid, but just to keep them alive. This was difficult since the planting area was about 6”x12”. But who knew? They fit the requirement of the day, being both cute and cheap. What I didn’t realize was how quickly soil dries out in small containers, and particularly in terra cotta. To do well they required constant watering, which in our house means daily acrobatics with the upstairs screens, something I’m far too lazy to do. Beyond the water issue, I’d been sticking my fingers in my ears whenever I heard that plants need room to spread their roots and grow and thrive.

The result of installing these stingy boxes and giving inadequate care was that most of my plants went belly up pretty regularly. The rest were generally sickly. And I could kiss the lot goodbye come August and the family vacation. Our trusty roof that overhangs the front, keeping the windows shaded and the rain away, also keep the sills dry as a bone. There’s not a prayer that the rain might help with the watering. Nothing was ever alive on our return. Now if I weren’t such a slug this might have worked out. But I am, so it didn’t.

These London boxes though, completely turned my thinking around. Happily, my husband the genius carpenter, was just as entranced. The proof was that was that the wood to build them was purchased and not left warping away in the basement for five years. He had them hammered together, installed and painted within a week. Gloriously deep, and window width, the boxes are painted blackish purple to match the front door. Disobeying the rules about drainage (given my conditions, when do window boxes get a chance to drain? They dry out too fast. The trick is to keep the water in, not let it out) each box was lined with heavy plastic then filled with ordinary potting soil.

We got real lucky with plants that spring  but the hardy material can be installed in fall as well. The weekend the boxes were completed, Home Depot had a sale on miniature boxwood. They were, and are, the best price I’ve seen. Beautifully pinecone shaped, 12 inches tall, healthy and green, each plant was something like $6. Drawing on my wonderful collection of photographs from London, I added small leafed ivy along the front, and packed each corner with some of the oversupply of candytuft from the back yard. The annuals were added next, deep purple petunias for their fragrance, pale pink begonias for their drought resistance, and geraniums for a little aerial interest. The whole was instantly charming, and a tourist attraction by mid-summer. And miracle of miracles the boxes required watering no more than twice a week.

In the autumn I lifted the annuals to drop in miniature tulips and narcissus, then I put the annuals back on top to die when they would. By Christmas the boxes were still splendid with greenery and instead of the usual spare window display of a single white candle lamp, each wee tree was decked with a short strand of white lights. For a little more interest I poked baby’s breath in the gaps left after the annuals died. By late February, the bulbs were poking through and, given our absurdly mild winter, the candytuft was already beginning to bloom.

This spring I bought myself a little treat, Window Boxes by Tovah Martin, a slender $12.95 paperback in Houghton Mifflin’s Taylor’s Weekend Gardening Guides series. Martin’s packed her book with gorgeous photographs of the most spectacular window boxes, and filled it with tips on planting and maintenance. Her suggestions include tuberous begonias, fuschias and the splendid leaves of caladiums for shaded spaces, combining verbena and petunias in sunny spots to attract butterflies, and unusual combinations like brilliant red ‘honeysuckle’ fuscia, white daisy leafed chrysanthemums, and trailing blue scarvola. My favorite, given the deep shade of my late summer backyard, is using the boxes for vegetables and fruits. Martin includes in her suggestions ornamental strawberries, chives, Brussels sprouts, lettuce and peppers. I’d think cherry tomatoes might take to the boxes as well.

One thing Martin neglects, perhaps it’s because she lives so far north that any somesuch wouldn’t have a chance, is the year ‘round window box. Hers are filled with bulbs for the spring then wintered over in the garage. Given our climate, and my test run, there’s no reason to do this here. Even if you live where the hot air doesn’t blow quite so strongly, with a little energy most boxes can be moved inside for the few bitter weeks we see each year, or kept safe for a couple of nights with a cover of black plastic.