Plants to Flatter Your Home

Garden tip from Window Boxes Indoors & Out — 100 Projects & Planting Ideas for All Four Seasons by James Cramer & Dean Johnson, Storey Publishing, 176 pages, softcover, $16.95

In Window Boxes, Indoors & Out, James Cramer and Dean Johnson take the window box beyond the ordinary with inspired ideas that span the seasons and brighten holidays, match house styles and bring in fragrances, and provide tips on planting, planters, color combinations and resources. Readers also will take pleasure in the more than 150 full-color photos.

Did you know that there are certain types of blooms, foliage and even plant shapes that, when placed in a window box on the exterior of your home, will accentuate the architecture of your house? Here are three house types with style-matching window box ideas:

Formal House
Fill window boxes with dramatic plants that have a definite shape: small dwarf Alberta spruce, ivy, hosta, caladium, dwarf boxwood, daffodils, tulips. 

Paint the boxes the same color as the house trim or shutters.

Place a pair of tapering plant stands on either side of the front door to underscore the symmetry.

Rustic House
Fill window boxes with fluffy, irregular plants: vinca, lobelia, black-eyed Susans, maidenhair fern, trailing snapdragons, zinnias, old-fashioned varieties of flowers.

Use weathered wooden boxes or paint boxes in several gradations of the same color with the darker ones on the bottom story and the lightest at the top.

Place concrete troughs and urns filled with similar flowers and foliage outside the house.

Victorian Cottage
Fill window boxes to overflowing with multicolored flowers: violets, phlox, cosmos, Boston fern, petunias, nasturtiums, lavender.

Paint your window boxes in bright colors or use wire boxes.

Decorate the front porch with potted begonias on a metal stand with outstretched arms.