Give Your Home an Extra Pop of Color

The Best Window Box Garden Plants

Window boxes can help add life and color to any part of your home. They give you depth and increase curb appeal, while creating a fun hobby that’s beautiful throughout the year. Window box gardening also gives you an easy way to create centerpieces or have a healthy snack.

Here are just a few of our favorite plants for a garden window box, including those ever-popular hanging window gardens:

•  Add bold coloring choices. If you want a strong color set, then you can’t go better than bold. Mix whites, yellows and coral colors to liven up any paint job. Consider a mix of pansies and delphiniums (strong blues) with petunias and twinspurs (the coral variety) alongside a choice of white, such as the geranium.
•  Pink is in. Window sill planters and box gardens follow many other color trends, but pink remains a dominant force in the aesthetic world. If you want to try your hand at a popping pink planter, mix full, tall and hanging plants. We recommend a variety that would include pink geraniums, pink or purple petunias, pink nicotiana and the ever-popular “Pink Beauty” caladium.
•  Tone down with color Euphorbia. Euphorbia’s silver leaves provide a great balance to your flowery designs by toning down bright colors. The same effect can be achieved when you allow a sweet-potato vine to take over. You’ll still have the pop, and it will improve many color combinations when picking other pink, purple and violet flowers.
•  Grow your own veggies. Many homeowners are turning window gardening into an easy way to add a few fresh vegetables to their diet. Many small variety veggies work well for your window sill. Some of the options we’ve seen grown successfully include bush and cherry tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, peas, radishes and even spinach and loose-leaf lettuce.

How Do I Choose?

There are so many great plants designed for indoor/outdoor window gardens and window sill planters that it can be difficult to pick exactly what you want to plant. You’ll want to stick to aesthetic appeal as your guiding principle because your home deserves to be beautiful.

After you have a general idea of your desired style, consider these elements of your garden window box:

•  Sunlight or shade. Place your window box and watch it for about a day to see how much sun it’ll get. For lots of sunlight, look to marigolds, geraniums, dusty millers or even petunias for a good mix of color and greenery. Shady boxes will have a more limited plant choice, but you can get a lot of amazing color from impatiens and a few others that run the gamut of jewel tones.
•  Bloom season. Your window sill planter can have vibrant life and color from spring through fall with the right mix, especially if it’s backed by greenery that lasts all year. Determine complementary colors and then try to match their bloom times across your year. Don’t forget that some planting times may also be able to be slightly manipulated, such as pansies planted in the fall blooming during the winter as long the weather isn’t too bad.

Beautiful plants don’t just have to be displayed during the spring time. With a little planning and the right plants for your space, you can have gorgeous greenery and flowers all year.