Windowboxes: the good, the bad, and the ugly

The common-or-garden windowbox: Easily achieved, but not to be recommended

I am excited to have, this very afternoon, launched my new windowbox service (you can find out about it on my website here). As a keen gardener and garden designer, I have an embarrassing tendency to give people's front gardens a good look as I stroll past, and this summer I have noticed an abundance of sad, generally dead or dying windowboxes. I have decided to do make the world a better place, one windowbox at a time.

The problem with windowboxes is that they're very easy to get started, but not so easy to keep going (I'm sure there's a nice analogy there with diets, or exercise regimes). You pop down to B&Q one sunny weekend, and buy it all: the box, the compost, some plants that are looking good. You plant it up and proudly display it outside (slightly frustrated that you didn't get the next size up, because the box now looks rather small on your capacious windowsill). You appreciate it as you come and go for the next few days. You may even remember to water it for a week or so. But sooner or later, after a few baking hot summer days when you've had better things to do, the petunias start to droop. The geranium leaves slowly turn an alarming shade of brown, and soon enough the only plant growing with any gusto is a solitary enterprising dandelion. Soon enough you have a container that looks like it was planted by Wednesday Adams.

Windowboxes, like any smallish container, have a serious drawback for plants: they simply dry out too quickly. My windowboxes all have water-retaining crystals added (not, as you might imagine, a hormonal woman's worst nightmare, but a handy horticultural product that tides plants over in drought emergencies), and I always ensure the container is as big as possible - partly this looks better, and gives you more space for plants, and partly a bigger container dries out more slowly than a small one.

Plants that are bought when already in bloom, which is always tempting when standing in the garden centre, are inevitably closer to the end of their flowering period than plants that are only in bud, but any successful containerised planting scheme will need regular attention and topping-up. I am therefore offering a maintenance service, to come back and make sure all windowboxes are looking their best. 

In the spirit of research, I am intending to photograph good and bad examples of windowboxes to add to the blog. I forsee that photographing beautiful examples will be a doddle, but I'm slightly nervous about how I politely persuade home-owners that I really want to snap their thoroughly dead plants - avoiding being both offensive and suspicious may be a challenge. If the 'what not to do' examples all seem to have been taken by torchlight, you'll know why. Although that really will look suspicious if I get caught...