might possibly be
coaxed to grow, if man thought less of gain and more of beauty, can be
made more like what home ought to be, with but little trouble and
expense, by giving these boxes a chance to do their good work at their
windows. Blessed be the window-box!

Many persons, however, fail to attain success in the cultivation of
plants in boxes at the window-sill, and their failures have given rise
to the impression in the minds of those who have watched their
undertaking, that success with them is very problematical. "It _looks_
easy," said a woman to me last season, "when you see somebody else's box
just running over with vines, but when you come to make the attempt for
yourself you wake up to the fact that there's a knack to it that most of
us fail to discover. I've tried my best, for the last three years, to
have such boxes as my neighbor has, and I haven't found out what's wrong
yet. I invest in the plants that are told me to be best adapted to
window-box culture. I plant them, and then I coax them and coddle them.
I fertilize them and I shower them, but they stubbornly refuse to do
well. They _start off_ all right, but by the time they ought to be doing
great things they begin to look rusty, and it isn't long before they
look so sickly and forlorn that I feel like putting them out of their
misery by dumping them in the ash-heap."

Now this woman's experience is the experience of many other women. She
thinks,--and they think,--that they lack the "gift" that enables some
persons to grow flowers successfully while others fail utterly with
them. They haven't "the knack." Now, as I have said elsewhere in this
book, there's no such thing as "a knack" in flower-growing. Instead of
"a knack" it's a "know-how." Ninety-nine times out of a hundred failure
with window-boxes is due to just one thing: They let their plants die
simply because they do not give them water enough.

Liberal watering is the "know-how" that a person must have to make a
success of growing; good plants in window and veranda boxes. Simply
that, and nothing more.

The average woman isn't given to "studying into things" as much as the
average man is, so she often fails to get at the whys and wherefores of
many happenings. She sees the plants in her boxes dying slowly, but she
fails to take note of the fact that evaporation from these boxes is
very rapid. It could not be otherwise because of their exposure to wind
and air on all sides. She applies wate