WINDOW GARDENING 



CH^I^TER I. 



Its Pleasures — Increase in Popular Taste — Refining 

 Influences. 



No home of taste is now considered complete without its Window Garden. 

 Indeed it may be said that Window Gardening is one of the most elegant, satis- 

 factory, yet least expensive of all departments of Rural Taste. As a useful means 

 for developing a taste for plant-life and a love for flowers, I count nothing so 

 effective as this simple style of gardening ; for who has not noticed that where 

 flowers reign, grace of raind and manner soon follow. One of the advantages of 

 Window Gardening is its simplicity, open to every one and impossible to none. 

 Thousands of persons confined to their homes for the greater part of their life have 

 no greater rural estate than that which the Window Garden aflfords. To watch 

 the unfolding leaves and budding flowers, the development of branch after branch, 

 is a study of the reality of plant-life, exquisitely interesting to the soul who finds 

 in it its only world of pleasure and sentiment. 



It is a form of gardening too, oi permanent use and value. The Window Gar- 

 den is independent to a large degree of the varying seasons, for it can be made 

 attractive every month in the year. The advent of Spring, Summer and Autumn, 

 only render the plants of the Window Garden more luxuriant and make the flow- 

 ers more brilliant, but they do not die with the first frost or cold wnid in winter. 

 When the prospect without is dreary, we can still look to our fern-cases or 

 window-boxes or hanging-baskets and behold in them objects of increased admi- 

 ration, because they are so charming in their contrast with the desolateness with- 

 out, and are genial remembrances of greener days gone by. 



The universal popularity of Window Gardens, whether large or small, simple 

 or elaborate, is the evidence of a growing taste for flowers and ornamental plants 

 in all circles of society. We have only to notice in all our large cities, towns and 

 villages, how frequent window decorations have become, sometimes seeming as if 

 not a single house was without them in many of our most fashionable avenues. «In 

 European cities the citizens indulge even more extensively and passionately in their 

 plant pleasures than we do ; every home is decorated from the workingman's 

 window, and its few flower-pots of balsams, to the fernery and tile jardinieres of the 

 aristocratic mansion. 



