One of the most quaint and delightful aspects of southern European (Italy, Spain, Greece) home windows is the variety of hanging window boxes filled to the brim with a riot of flowering and colorful annual and perennial plants.

The great thing about window box gardens is that you can add or delete any plant as desired, thus changing the scenery whenever needed, for instance when a plant has withered away or to highlight any festive day of the year.

There are a variety of window boxes available, in different sizes and material. Most popular are the cedar or redwood boxes and a popular size is three feet long and eight inches wide. You’d be amazed how many plants you can get into a box of this size. You can also use wire framed boxes or shapes, lined with sphagnum moss.

Make sure there are several holes in the bottom of the container; otherwise drill several half inch diameter holes, so that excess water can drain away. Before planting, cover the holes with pieces of old window screening or a rock, to prevent the soil from washing out.

Choice of plants is plentiful! Large selections of annuals – both foliage and flowering – are offered at this time of the season. Stay away from plants that will quickly outgrow the confinement of a box.

Then there is the largest selection of perennials that I have ever seen and now you can buy them in five inch pots (instead of 1 gallon size). There are some really neat new perennial varieties on the market. Check them out.

Use trailing and hanging plants in front of the box, so they can tumble over the edge, whereas upright growing plants belong at the back.

For a most attractive impact, select compatible colors. You may want to consult an artist’s color wheel to pre-plan your color selection. Or you may keep the color scheme simple by staying with one color, offset by greenery or use a mixture of two or three colors. Experiment and give yourself permission to be creative. In nature anything goes.

Fill the planter box with an all-purpose potting mix (regular garden soil is too heavy). Ideal is a mix that contains sphagnum peatmoss on their list of ingredients.

The actual planting is the most fun part. Instead of lining the plants up in straight little rows, stagger them and for a mass effect, space them together closer than normally recommended.

Because soil in containers dries quickly in hot weather, it is important to keep an eye on the soil’s moisture level on a daily basis. If the soil looks and feels dry to the touch, moisten it until water drips through the drainage holes. If you lead a busy lifestyle, an automatic watering system with “spaghetti-type” tubes might be a problem solver here.

It is essential to feed the plants twice a month with a water-soluble fertilizer, specially blended in a formula for flowering plants. This usually means that the middle number is higher than the first one, i.e. 15-30-15 NPK (NPK stands for Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium.) Of course you can also mix a granular slow-release fertilizer into the potting mix prior to planting. These pellets usually last up to three months.

Here are some planting ideas, depending on the exposure you can offer the plants. For a sunny location, choose sun-loving flowering plants, such as petunia, verbena, geranium and trailing ivy-geranium. If you prefer primary colors, use red salvia in the back, purple ageratum in the center, offset with sunny-yellow dwarf marigold and a trailing multi-color portulaca in the front.

For shady areas, use fuchsia, impatiens, begonia, cyclamen, lobelia and browalia. For instance, plant an upright growing pink fuchsia in the back along with purple browalia; in the center pink impatiens (check out the beautiful new varieties of New Guinea impatiens that also tolerate sun), alternated with white impatiens and in the front some blue lobelias with trailing English ivy.

Foliage plants that love the shade are trailing vincas, colorful coleus, multi-colored caladium, asparagus fern and English ivy.

Make this an exciting weekend-project and if you have small children in your family, get them involved in their own planting project. Let them choose their favorite plants and teach them the responsibility of taking care of their very own planter box.

Tineke Wilders is a freelance garden writer. A native of The Netherlands and a Canadian, she is a graduate of both the Michigan and the southern California Master Gardener programs and has written about the world of plants, flowers and nature for over 30 years. She can be reached at tinekegardens@juno.com