Description:
Window boxes no longer must be the sister of the white picket fence. Calling such diverse receptacles as pumpkins, gourds, hats, a broken earthen pot, and even eggshells to service, authors James Cramer and Dean Johnson, in Window Boxes: Indoors and Out, redefine the concept of windowbox, and generate a lot of beautiful ideas in the process. Window boxes can serve many purposes, from homes for a kitchen herb garden to grand, overspilling fountains of trailing plants and flowers. And when there's a paucity of garden real estate, lack of time to tend a full-size garden plot, or an off-season hankering to simply grow something, window boxes provide creative outlets and solutions. Watching a forced amaryllis gracefully bloom in an antique planter in January or starting seedlings in a copper box inside a sunny window in early spring can quell the gardening jones of many a hibernating green thumb and help get a jump on the growing season. Along with ideas for window-box plantings for every season and many holidays, from May Day boxes popping with pansies and lilies to Christmas boxes fragrant with tiny pine trees and demure snowdrops, Cramer and Johnson also detail how to make and decorate many boxes (although beginners may need more detailed instructions than the brief ones given here), including a copper box, a Victorian box, a terrarium box, harvest boxes, and many more. With this helpful, evocatively photographed handbook and an open mind, creating window boxes will become part of the gardener's and the interior designer's repertoire all year round. --Stefanie Durbin
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