Bright and Cheerful Winter Window Boxes

This is not a subtle color palate, that's for sure. Bright and cheerful was the plan, and if this isn't cheerful, I don't know what is. Cyclamen are always the star of my winter window boxes, and everything else is planned around them. They bloom with a solid display of color until March when I redo the boxes. Some years I have done a red and white color theme for Christmas window boxes. This year I chose bright pink and deep magenta cyclamen.

I just love how window boxes bring the garden into the house. Sitting at our little telephone desk, the flowers are so close you can really appreciate all of the details. Right outside our kitchen window, the flowers make doing dishes much more enjoyable!

When planting the window boxes, I follow the "Thriller, Filler, Spiller" idea. Choose something with some height and impact as the triller. Shorter plants are the filler, and the trailing plants are the spiller. The cyclamen are the "thriller" in the box, along with the dark pink stock which will grow taller. Yellow pansies and mixed linaria are fillers.