14 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
THE WINDOW-BOX WITH THE COLOR SCHEME 
Its Real Purpose Is to Add a Pleasant Touch of 
Growing Things to the House Exterior—11 Must 
Be Harmonious in Line, Color and Planting 
The Importance of Color Harmony 
At the extreme right is a pottery window-box 
with a grey-green stripe at top and bottom and 
a. leaf design worked out in green and yellow; 
the vertical stripes are black, $7.50. The middle 
box is white terra cotta , $11.50. At the left the 
box is grey terra cotta decorated with inter¬ 
locking scrolls and leaves, $12.50 
moved, the effect is impaired. It should 
have been arranged for an exterior instead 
of an interior point of view. 
Yet window-boxes properly planted and 
arranged are often effective and well worth 
while. We may place them on the piazza 
railings, or, if we are in a city where piazzas 
are a thing of hearsay rather than sight, we 
can content ourselves with filling our win¬ 
dows, knowing that is the nearest approach 
to a flower bed we can hope for. 
Before we invest in plants view the house 
from the outside and decide on the color of 
the boxes. We do not want the box to be 
in evidence any more than necessary; conse¬ 
quently, choose a color that will be the least 
conspicuous against that of the house. 
Match the house color if possible. If this 
cannot be done, choose some neutral tint 
that does not attract attention, for it is the 
flowers that decorate, not the box! For 
the flowers themselves choose a color 
scheme that will produce harmonious con¬ 
trast with the house. But never be guilty 
of placing pink geraniums and magenta 
petunias against a red brick house! 
One of the most attractive treatments of 
the window-box is in connection with a 
house built in Mission style, with a plas¬ 
tered surface and piazzas on both the first 
and second floors. With the yellow-grey 
of the plastered wall as a background, the 
□TO- 
M ANY things in life that might be beau¬ 
tiful fail of accomplishing their pur¬ 
pose because of lack of thought in their 
preparation, and among these the window- 
box seems especially unfortunate. De¬ 
signed to express beauty and to ornament 
the house, it often becomes an unsightly 
blemish upon the otherwise unbroken ex¬ 
panse of the house front. 
It is natural for many of us to plan the 
window-box from the viewpoint of the in¬ 
terior of the house; then we have a back¬ 
ground of green lawn, or the grey of pave¬ 
ments, or the dun yellow of the streets, 
to set off the color of the flowers. It pleases 
us until we view that same box of flowers 
from the street, and then, somehow, it dis¬ 
appoints us. Its original background re¬ 
The residence of E. E. Boynton, Esq., at Rochester, N. Y., is built 
along the Frank Lloyd Wright lines, admitting an unusual display 
of window-boxes. Pitkin & Weinrichter, landscape architects 
Although window-boxes may be set anywhere one desires to place 
them, there are often unusual positions on the house fatade, as 
in an indented arch, where they will prove especially interesting 
