Window boxes never excited me. Most people plant them with the same old petunias, then throw the annuals out at the end of the season. I didn’t like the waste or the lack of creativity.
Then, last spring, I was strolling through Brooklyn Heights, a New York neighborhood filled with historic houses with ample sills for boxes. I happened by a house with the strangest, most beautiful things growing by its windows: There were overscale plants next to ones far smaller; sculptural things in Seussical arrays; diverse textures, bursts of color, and a decided lack of symmetry.
I couldn’t help myself; I knocked on the door and asked the homeowner who had designed her plantings. That’s how I found out about Jessie LeBaron, the landscape designer and painter who changed my mind about window boxes.
“I like a box to look as if no one made it, like you were walking through a woodland, and it just happened,” LeBaron told me when we met recently at Peace Tree Farm, an organic wholesale nursery in Pennsylvania. I had invited her there to watch her compose two window boxes—one for sun, the other for shade. Now she was rough-handling a blush-blossomed hellebore called ‘Candy Love’.
“People get nervous about killing plants, but they’re tough,” she said with a shrug. “I can pull off part of the rootball, open it up, and fit in wacky little moments.”
The wacky moments in this shade box included a heart fern, whose Valentine-shaped leaves she left flopping over the edge of the reclaimed-wood container, and a mahogany fern, its fronds cascading Rapunzel-like to one side. Spreading its antlers over the lot was a staghorn fern, positioned slightly off-center.
“I like a window box to look as if no one made it, like you were walking through woods, and it just happened,” Lebaron says.
“I don’t like to do things all matchy-matchy,” said LeBaron. “I like to throw in an oddball.” Her sun box had a few of these: two tall sprigs of lavender—LeBaron is fearless with height—and a lone aloe, jabbing sawtoothed tentacles at a mob of juicy echeverias and other succulents, blooming in oranges and purples.
“Pack it in? I do. It just makes the box incredibly lush. If things get too crazy, I just pop them out and plant them somewhere else,” LeBaron said as she finished. The artist in her added, “It’s almost like an installation.”
A Better Box
Plant nurseries are full of temptations. When you shop, says Brooklyn-based landscape designer Jessie LeBaron, “go in with a plan, a color palette, your planting conditions, and your inspiration. Otherwise, you can have a meltdown and end up buying plants that you shouldn’t.” Here, LeBaron’s tips for building better window boxes:
1. Full-sun boxes look great with bursts of color, particularly when the blooms are on water-conserving plants that can fend for themselves while you’re away on summer weekends. In this box, LeBaron planted drought-tolerant Spanish lavender with succulents including, from left, , Doris Taylor echeveria, ghost echeveria, and . The Loll Designs planter is 100 percent recycled plastic; you’ll have to drill your own drainage holes. Use a fast-draining soil mix for succulents, and have a plan for succession at summer’s end. Tender perennials like these succulents can be brought indoors in winter or moved to the garden in warmer climates.
2. For a north-facing window that doesn’t get sun, choose shade lovers. “Be brave,” LeBaron says. “Take chances. If you love the look of plants together, talk to your nursery to see if they’re a good fit.” She matched, from left, mahogany fern with Candy Love hellebore, heart fern, and a staghorn fern in a reclaimed-wood box is from Jamali Garden. Expect some ferns to need steady moisture. LeBaron suggests a downspout diverter like Rain Wizard that can be fitted to a drip irrigation system to harvest water from your gutters.