Front yard boxes and container plants should be well designed, with plants changed out every season or more often to keep the display fresh. It's time to learn how to arrange the right plants for your region and for the right season, so you can have a stunning fall window box all season long.
Here are 16 diverse and beautiful window boxes to give you ideas for fall.
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Choose Urban Boxes
The Minneapolis-based design firm Botanical Blitz focuses on outdoor floral arrangements and displays, creating growing works of art and changing out plants for clients each season or more often. Large planters on an urban deck featuring eye-catching plants like lime green sweet potato vine (Ipomea), ornamental grasses, mums, coreopsis, and trailing needlepoint ivy.
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Mix Different Plants and Flowers
Yellow chrysanthemums, dwarf ornamental grasses, and ornamental kale provide rich, deep tones of autumn. Small pumpkins are tucked in as a reminder that Halloween and pumpkin pies are around the corner.
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Go Green
Linda of Q is for Quandie mixed all different types of plants and flowers to create a luscious display. She included Jester's Crown fern, green and white caladium, cut Annabelle hydrangea flowers, dried Astilbe flowers, frilly ornamental kale, and a white pumpkin to bring in various textures. She recommends this arrangement for early fall up until frost; the first hard frost will kill the caladium.
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Find Tulip Substitutes
Since tulips don't grow in the fall, Elizabeth of Pretty Pink Tulips keeps the trailing ivy and other plants in her window box, going for an easy update with mums and pumpkins.
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Use Fillers
Liz Latham of Hoosier Homemade likes to use odd numbers (a good design rule) for her Indiana home's window boxes. For fall, she uses larger pumpkins and gourds in the middle, and at each end, Mum plants, and dried hydrangea flowers tucked into a bed of hay and dried grasses that spill over the box for a fun look.
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Play With Color
Bria Hammel Interiors, based in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, created a stunning lavender purple and white autumn window box using chrysanthemums, different varieties of ornamental kale and cabbage, white pumpkins, and pale gourds.
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Use Your Own Garden
Jane and Leo Windham of Cottage at the Crossroads are do-it-yourselfers who love to make beautiful things happen in their yard. Their fall window box includes gourds grown in the garden, English ivy, creeping Jenny, foxtail fern (asparagus fern), and annual additions of orange marigolds.
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Match Colors
Snapdragons, million bells, sweet alyssum, and purple pansies grace a brick red-colored window box on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina. The matching orange flowers create an overall cohesive look.
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Make It Whimsical
A few mainstays remain along with the mushroom-shaped garden ornaments, but this box is freshened up for fall with yellow-orange coreopsis, ornamental peppers, red-stemmed euphorbia (spurge), pimply yellow gourds, and cream and orange mini pumpkins.
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Create a Charming Theme
Rust-orange, yellow, and lilac mums are teamed with beautiful deep-purple million bells (Calibrachoa) and a pumpkin for a charming arrangement.
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Form Structure
A bay window is adorned with three window boxes, each planted identically with ornamental grasses that create a fountain effect.
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Style Succulents
In some parts of the southwestern United States and other regions with mild winters, succulents thrive outdoors throughout the year. A window box planted in autumn with colorful succulents will grow during the winter and produce flowers in early spring. This box features a variegated pelargonium (the red and green leaves; not a succulent), flower-like Aeonium, blue-chalk Senecio, and Duddleya.
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Assort Pumpkins
Beth Schelle of Indigo Gardens and Design in South Bend, Indiana, places gourds and pumpkins in various patterns, colors, and shapes in a long window box. Evergreens and arborvitae are tucked in to soften the look and transition to winter.
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Make a Statement
Dark pink and purple chrysanthemums are planted with tropical-looking, leather-leaf crotons, which make a striking backdrop.
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Layer Plants
Florence and Cecelia of Brooklyn Window Boxes by Flo's Gardens layered various plants in the window box. In the back, taller grasses or shrub-like plants are placed, while two mid-size plants fill the middle. Up front, three smaller trailing or spilling plants form a mix of flowers and greenery. Their results are stunning foot traffic-stopping displays for each season.
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Aim for Classics
Geraniums are hardy and can live for decades. Pruning spent flowers will keep your geraniums looking their best—a must for window boxes that everyone passing by will see. A classic red geranium (actually a pelargonium) shares space with yellow lantana and blue salvia, which all continue to bloom in early fall.