If you enjoy the company of houseplants, consider cultivating a window garden, which is ideal for showing off plants in the winter.
Creating a window garden is easy—you need only to extend the existing sill, and then mount, on the window frame, glass shelves, brackets (if you want them), and lengths of wire (for training vines).
In my window garden, I paint horticultural portraits to emphasize the seasons. Want to take a look? In this slide show, I'll show you the many different window gardens I've created in my house.
Left: It’s no trouble to outfit a bay window with glass shelves and brackets. Extending the sill, however, will likely require the skill of a carpenter. For the bay window in my library (pictured), sheets of heavy plywood were used to form a broad surface for plants. This window in January affords copious quarters for geraniums of all kinds, pansies, amaryllis, blue hydrangeas, and vines. On the brackets are rose-scented geraniums.
Kevin Lee Jacobs blogs at A Garden for the House. He was introduced to gardening when he was no taller than a delphinium. Today, his home in upstate New York features formal rose gardens outdoors and lavish window gardens indoors.
