Windows of private life

As Philippe Ariès has shown, the idea of privacy began to take shape in the early modern period, particularly in England.Footnote ⁸ This process culminated in the nineteenth century, when the Victorian middle-class home was imagined as a haven of moral virtue and intimacy, yet lived under the constant possibility of being seen.Footnote ⁹ The growing prominence of glass in the Victorian city posed a dilemma for the ideal of the home as a sheltered retreat. Windows brought light and air into the interiors, yet the increase in their size and number rendered them more susceptible to public scrutiny.Footnote ¹⁰ The domestic window thus emerged as a point of tension: a structural necessity that also functioned as a symbolic breach. If the Englishman’s home was his castle, the window was its weakest point: transparent, exposed and vulnerable to the gaze of strangers.

Even when veiled or obscured, the window signalled permeability, hinting that something lay behind. Although not designed to attract attention like shop windows, domestic windows nonetheless offered a curated façade to the street. Intentionally or not, they revealed selected signs of inner life and invited continual, if partial, inspection. In Foucauldian terms, they formed part of a broader visual regime in which visibility functioned as a disciplinary and socializing technology.Footnote ¹¹

The modern city produced a paradoxical condition: it brought people into unprecedented physical proximity, while simultaneously deepening their social isolation, dissolving mankind ‘into monads’.Footnote ¹² The city, however, not only created alienation, but also constructed a new sense of the self and its relation to the crowd. As Raymond Williams observed, it fostered a sense of collective awareness along with an excessive subjectivity.Footnote ¹³ Against this backdrop, Victorians became avid readers of appearances. Personality was thought to leave visible ‘tangible traces’ on bodies and surroundings.Footnote ¹⁴ In response, people learned both to decipher others and to control their own outward signs. Physiognomy was one interpretive system; clothing and possessions another.Footnote ¹⁵ The home, imagined as an extension of the self, became a legible surface from which character, personality and class could be inferred.Footnote ¹⁶

This view was expressed by Shirley Hibberd, a popular writer on domestic improvement in Victorian Britain, who declared: ‘the Home is the outside of a man; it is an external vesture and a visible embodiment of his mental character’.Footnote ¹⁷ Hibberd elaborated this idea by comparing the function of windows to that of speech: ‘As speech may be employed to conceal as well as to publish thoughts, so windows may be sometimes increased in value when occupied with objects that render them useless for their ordinary purposes.’Footnote ¹⁸ Like language, the window mediated between concealment and expression. It offered a surface through which householders could hint, gesture or withhold, crafting a carefully curated public self. It is precisely the disruption of the window’s ‘ordinary purpose’ as a light-admitting barrier that marks it as a cultural space, akin to speech. This dynamic is especially evident in the practice of placing objects on windowsills: partially obscuring the view while offering selected signs of the life within.

Whether the passer-by’s gaze was supervisory in a Benthamite sense or merely curious in a Benjaminian one, it was rarely neutral. As one journalist remarked in 1882, ‘the window is to a great extent the eye of the house’, on whose design ‘we may to a great extent form some opinion as to the disposition or the morale of the house itself’.Footnote ¹⁹ Visibility implied vulnerability. From grimy panes to lush displays, windows betrayed something of the interior and of its awareness to the external gaze. Of the various objects to be found on windowsills – from curtains, screens to birdcages – plants were probably the most common and visible. They acted both as barriers and as beacons, shielding the home from prying eyes while inviting admiration, interpretation and fantasy.

The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a significant increase in window gardening, a practice that had developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In 1785, William Cowper referred to the habit of those ‘immured in cities’ to ‘suspend their crazy boxes, planted thick’.Footnote ²⁰ In 1823, Elizabeth Kent’s anonymously published Flora Domestica was a harbinger of urban domestic gardening.Footnote ²¹ By 1834, observers claimed that along the whole of Oxford Street, there was hardly a house without flowers in its windows.Footnote ²² By the second half of the century, many noted a significant growth in the popularity of urban window gardening during their lifetimes.Footnote ²³ As advice texts on window gardening proliferated, Cowper’s lines became a stock refrain.Footnote ²⁴ Casual references across genres confirm the everyday presence of window plants. They are abundant in contemporary illustrations and photographs of urban building façades.Footnote ²⁵ They are also conspicuous in reports of housebreakings, where they posed a physical obstacle for burglars.Footnote ²⁶ Lastly, when left unsecured – falling on pedestrians or, at times, deliberately hurled at others – they became an urban hazard.Footnote ²⁷

By the late 1870s, one could declare window gardening ‘an institution’, as houses’ façades were commonly seen ‘glowing with all the colours of the rainbow’.Footnote ²⁸ An American traveller ranked West End window gardens among London’s ‘most remarkable sights’.Footnote ²⁹ Others described the city as a ‘continuous system of roadside gardening’.Footnote ³⁰ In his memoir, the dean of Rochester noted the vivid impression made while walking through London’s streets by the recent increase in flowers displayed everywhere – from exotic specimens in florists’ windows to ‘the window plants in the poor man’s home’.Footnote ³¹ These open-air displays also democratized exotics once confined to private conservatories, allowing city dwellers to ‘inhale the perfumes of Persia and Araby’ without leaving London.Footnote ³² Certain displays became familiar landmarks in the urban landscape. One writer hoped to glimpse the ‘kindred spirit’ who tended a much-loved window between Sloane and Eaton Squares.Footnote ³³ In fiction, too, urban plants lingered in memory. In The Lost World, a South American begonia triggers the recollection of a specific plant ‘kept in a pot in the window of a certain villa in Streatham’.Footnote ³⁴ Like the begonia, most window plants were not native to Britain, but not all retained an exotic appeal. Some, as the scarlet geranium and the mignonette, became so familiar that they acquired a local and humble resonance.Footnote ³⁵ The window garden thus registered not only the circulation of plants, but the changing cultural work of plant categories.

Deciphering the city

Already in the 1820s, writer and critic Leigh Hunt was among the first to reflect on window plants as part of the urban experience and to promote their cultivation. A close friend and brother-in-law of Elizabeth Kent, he contributed several letters to her Flora Domestica . Their shared engagement with domestic gardening suggests a broader interest in the subject within Hunt’s literary circle, known as the ‘Cockney School’.Footnote ³⁶

A year after the publication of Flora Domestica, Hunt published his ‘wishing-cap’ papers, in which the urban wanderer is granted the power of a super-seer: ‘for roofs and walls fly open before me, as easily as I fly over them; and I saw in an instant the whole neighborhood with all that was going on inside the houses’.Footnote ³⁷ As physical barriers dissolve, the hidden realities of city life are laid bare: ‘I shall content myself with expressing the agreeable surprise that seized me on observing a little room, the inhabitant of which was nursing an abundance of plants and flowers against the spring…The very spirit of the Flora Domestica seemed to be there.’Footnote ³⁸ Notably, as the wishing-cap enables Hunt to invade the interiors of city life, it is domestic gardening that is revealed at the heart of urban intimacy. While in this early text, the ‘nursing’ of plants features as a highly private practice, veiled from the public eye, a few years later, attitudes began to change.

In 1834, Hunt dedicated a series of three essays to the subject of urban windows.Footnote ³⁹ The first two examine windows from both the street and the interior, while the third is devoted entirely to the ‘Flower on your window’. Although the first two are not limited to window plants, they appear throughout as central elements of urban domesticity. They are no longer hidden from street view; instead, they form a part of the urban display.

The first essay considers windows as seen by urban pedestrians. From this perspective, window flowers appear to ‘give a liberal look to a house…more creditable to the occupants, from the certainty we have of its being their own work’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, plants are not merely adornments offered by the dwellers to fellow urbanites but meaningful mediators, initiating a non-verbal exchange between private and public:

The second essay, which explores the interior perspective, emphasizes the benefits of the window garden for the house’s inhabitants, creating a blind that provides privacy while also allowing a view to the outside.Footnote ⁴² Yet Hunt insists that, soon enough, domestic gardeners are instinctively led to grow plants ‘for others as well as for themselves’, turning the flowers ‘with their faces towards the street’.Footnote ⁴³ This idea resurfaces in a later text from 1848, where Hunt argues that window plants affect the passer-by’s eye much like ‘unexpected music to the ear’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The plant thus becomes a means by which the domestic sphere reaches outward, shaping the urban environment.

The presence of plants on windowsills was increasingly noted by urban passers-by, who recognized them as an integral element of the city’s scenery. First, they served as repositories of information, providing living ‘practical lessons’ in urban domestic gardening.Footnote ⁴⁵ They were also believed to exert a moral influence, making ‘mankind purer, happier, better’.Footnote ⁴⁶ For others, window plants offered relief from the urban bustle. As one 1850 article remarked: ‘Who can forget, as he walks along the streets of a city, how often his thoughts are unexpectedly recalled to other scenes by the sight of a few flowers growing in pots?’Footnote ⁴⁷ Encountering these miniature havens became part of the city-walk experience, evident in various contemporary sources. In ‘A city song’, Eliza Cook invites readers to stroll from palace halls to cellar floors, noting the ‘petted myrtle’ and ‘curling hyacinths’ in tinted glass, the ‘gay geranium’ greeting the sunlight and rosebuds ‘brought to share the beam’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the poem, as in other texts, the sight of window plants affirms that not all is evil in the city.

One of the most culturally revealing functions of urban window plants stemmed from their position between the private interior and the public street. Objects placed on windowsills attracted the attention of urban passers-by, who regarded them as offering ‘a very fair indication of the character of the ruling spirit within’.Footnote ⁴⁹ An 1864 article explored the kinds of information that could be gleaned from examining parlour windows, describing them as ‘volumes of domestic history open to perusal’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The author assumed a common habit among readers: imagining ‘the inmates of a dwelling from some peculiarity, or even the absence of peculiarity, in the dwelling itself’.Footnote ⁵¹ Window objects were presented as outward ‘manifestations’ revealing class, taste and disposition: an aquarium might suggest a love of nature, a lush arrangement of ferns, artistic refinement. Even the choice to display nothing could be read as telling, reflecting an upper-class desire ‘to look out without allowing the public to look in’.Footnote ⁵² In this and similar sources, plants appear alongside curtains, birdcages and aquariums as visible clues to the private lives concealed behind the façade. Among these signifiers, window plants carried particular weight, often regarded as potent indicators of the character, taste and aspirations of those within.Footnote ⁵³

Some accounts emphasized the distinctive character of individual window displays, so unique that one could infer a change of residence from the disappearance of a familiar arrangement in one window and its reappearance in another.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such gardens were considered expressions of the cultivator’s personality, offering passers-by, children and adults alike, recognizable signs that could be traced across the urban landscape. This idea appears in fiction as well, where window or indoor plants serve as revealing devices, offering readers insight into a character’s nature.Footnote ⁵⁵

The act of deciphering window displays was not only class-based but also strongly gendered. The cultivated domestic interior was commonly associated with femininity and window gardeners were often assumed to be women. In contrast, the role of interpreting these displays from the street was linked to the masculine archetype of the urban spectator, roaming the city in search of meanings.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a feminized space, the window garden was read as oscillating between passive exposure to the masculine gaze and suspicion that its display arose from an inappropriate desire for attention. This tension is illustrated in an 1876 article that links feminine love to admiration of window gardening.Footnote ⁵⁷ The allure of the floral arrangement is fused with the image of the ‘pretty girl’ tending it – aware that her presence, like the flowers, is oriented toward the street.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this view, gardener and garden merge into a single spectacle, open to scrutiny. Such dynamics were even more pronounced in portrayals of the windows of the poor.

The poor (wo)man’s plant

The window gardens of the poor attracted specific attention, often referred to as an independent branch of urban window gardening. Among the various photographs of gardens that appear in F.A. Bardswell’s Book of Town and Window Gardening (1903), only two refer to the identity of the gardener; in both it is a ‘poor man’ (Figure 2).Footnote ⁵⁹ The social identity of the cultivator emerges as a defining feature of the window garden precisely because the owner is absent: the reader, like the urban stroller, is left to read the scene through the plants alone. Together with other similar visual depictions, these images suggest a sustained interest in ‘poor’ gardening among urban observers and documenters.Footnote ⁶⁰ This visual scrutiny should be understood against the broader backdrop of curiosity about the urban poor, particularly their homes. As the privileged classes increasingly enclosed themselves behind layers of privacy, the home became the primary site for cultivating morals.Footnote ⁶¹ In contrast, poverty was associated with instability and disorder and the poor were often portrayed as rootless, transient figures lacking a proper domestic sphere.Footnote ⁶² Even when they lived in permanent dwellings, their interiors, obscured from view yet imagined as morally suspect, became potent sources of social anxiety and curiosity.Footnote ⁶³ In his 1854 London Shadows, architect and editor George Godwin promised his readers ‘A Glance at the “Homes” of the Thousands’: ‘We have, Asmodeus-like, removed the front wall from the top to the bottom, that our readers may examine without fear, and at their leisure, the extraordinary and distressing scene it presents.’Footnote ⁶⁴ The ‘glance’ offered to the reader is less a passive act of observation than an intrusion into the concealed domesticity of the poor, echoing Hunt’s wishing-cap. This act was framed not as voyeurism but as a moral necessity, since the poor’s retreat from public visibility was thought to foster ‘evil habits’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In practice, however, the poor were not always willing to open their doors to inspection. Even the most determined slummers often had to rely on what could be observed from the street. Plants, particularly flowers, functioned as instruments of soft intervention, as one noted: ‘We have heard of doors which were resolutely closed against the District Visitor, being first opened to receive a bunch of primroses – after which the Visitor was always welcome.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Plants served not only to entice doors to open but were also agents of reform. This idea was promoted by the Kyrle Society for the Diffusion of Beauty among the People, which distributed flowers to the urban poor.Footnote ⁶⁷ The society’s aim was to improve the domestic environments and moral standards of the poor by spreading ideals of beauty and sanitation and by encouraging wholesome leisure activities in place of the pub.

Figure 2.

‘Poor man’s window-box at Millwall.’ F.A. Bardswell, The Book of Town and Window Gardening (London and New York, 1903), plate facing 32. Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Contributed by Smithsonian Libraries.

Plants also operated as imaginary ‘door openers’ – or front wall-removers, if we follow Godwin’s imagery – allowing urban viewers to imagine crossing domestic thresholds and gaining access to concealed aspects of working-class lives. In this respect, the window gardens of poorer homes emerged as especially revealing. Unlike the manicured displays of the West End, often attributed to hired labour, the flowered sills of the slums reflected their cultivators’ own taste, effort and, at times, eccentricity.Footnote ⁶⁸ Some observers treated them with paternalistic astonishment, describing them a ‘singular and almost pathetic devotion to flowers’ or a naive fondness for anything green.Footnote ⁶⁹ Others saw them as authentic expressions of individual character. Gardening among the working class, asserted Rev. Samuel Hadden Parkes, was ‘a moral index’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Parkes, a leading advocate of window gardening among the poor, thought that those who gardened were among the ‘skilful [sic], the most industrious, and the most exemplary’ of workers.Footnote ⁷¹

This echoed a wider belief that gardening, particularly of the lower classes, signified inner virtue. As Mary Howitt wrote, ‘in the poor man’s garden grow…Kind thoughts, contentment, peace of mind // And joy for weary hours.’Footnote ⁷² Some observers considered window gardens as revelations of the longings of the urban poor for their rural past.Footnote ⁷³ Jane Loudon, popular gardening writer, recalled being moved by such displays, which ‘are all that remain to remind them of their native fields’.Footnote ⁷⁴ John Ruskin similarly discerned a quiet dignity in these urban blooms, which ‘mark, as with a little broken fragment of rainbow, the windows of the workers in whose hearts rests the covenant of peace’.Footnote ⁷⁵ They offered a reassurance: visual markers of comfort, stability and moral order amid bleak surroundings. As one gardening correspondent noted, the sight of pet plants triggered hope that ‘there was still a green spot left that might tend to better things’.Footnote ⁷⁶ From this perspective, the ‘affectionate care’ bestowed on plants was ‘one of the most hopeful signs of East London’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Along this comforting sentiment, the scrutiny of poor windows was often embedded with a voyeuristic motivation. In an 1884 article, the writer recalls walking down a city street and finding herself gazing upon windows ‘speculating as to the interiors of the various dwellings from the appearance of these very correct gauges of respectability’. Among various visual hints – such as clean panes and a birdcage – she is particularly attracted to the sight of flowers, which keep ‘alive the memory of country sights and smells in crowded city pent’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The window plants prove to be highly informative for the viewer’s inquisitive inspection, as they form ‘valuable indexes’ of their owners: ‘the solitary pot of geranium or mignonette the lonely seamstress cherished as reminding her of bygone days’, or the ‘pretty window-box, which the ingenious and thrifty mechanic had made to hold his carefully tended plants’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The writer assures her readers that these indicators are reliable, offering the ‘groundwork of a pretty correct picture’. From here, it is a simple move to imagine not only the interior of the house – clean hearth and white walls adorned with prints – but also the family itself, with happy children, a hardworking husband and a devoted housewife. Conversely, the absence of plants suggests neglected children, a careless wife and a drunk husband.

Some reformers took an active stance, seeking to encourage the poor to grow and display window plants. Yet it was not always clear what was on display: the carefully tended plant, or the character of its impoverished cultivator. This was epitomized in what was known as the ‘window gardening movement’. Originating in 1860 in Bloomsbury, London and spreading across Britain, the movement included local societies and charitable initiatives that promoted window gardening among the poor through the organization of flower shows.Footnote ⁸⁰

An article published in The Boy’s Miscellany in 1863 argued that poverty often causes people to barricade themselves ‘as men in fear of siege’. Yet plants offer reformers a way in: ‘The flower-show…opens a door of access otherwise closed; the flowers act as masters of the ceremonies, to introduce the poor man to those who would be his benefactors, without robbing him of his independence; and thus there is in this movement which may prove to be the germ of a genuine social reform.’Footnote ⁸¹ As with the distributed flowers mentioned above, the plant functions again as a mediator, bridging social classes and metaphorically opening closed doors. This mediation operated on two levels. First, the flower shows themselves created opportunities for cross-class encounters. Contemporary accounts emphasized the unusual nature of such meetings, often commenting on the appearance and behaviour of the lower-class attendees. Second, and more importantly, the exhibited specimens served as informative proxies, conveying something of their growers’ private lives. In this sense, descriptions of the shows closely resemble those of street passers-by endeavouring to decipher the inner lives of the inhabitants.

Plants revealed not only the morals and character of their cultivators, but also their private circumstances. At exhibitions, plants became mediators through which cultivators and their life conditions were evoked in the imagination. As one observer noted, flowers cultivated by hospital inmates ‘call up the wan faces and trembling hands’ of their caretakers.Footnote ⁸² Another wrote that the exhibition flowers ‘breathed whispers of strange histories’, revealing whether they were reared in homes in crowded slums, hospitals or even workhouses.Footnote ⁸³ These whispered intimations formed part of the fascination such shows held for middle- and upper-class visitors.

It should be noted that, like the window display, the poor were not only passive objects of top-down scrutiny, but also active – and often enthusiastic – exhibitors. To them, the flower shows offered a rare opportunity for self-presentation before the respectable classes, to be seen on their own terms. Rev. Samuel Hadden Parkes, who initiated and championed the movement, encouraged participation by assuring would-be exhibitors that the effort of cultivation was well repaid by the sight of ‘your own plant there, and half the world looking on and admiring it’.Footnote ⁸⁴

While flower shows provided a designated arena for the poor to present themselves to the public gaze, the logic of display extended beyond the tent. Beginning in the 1860s, with the rise of the window gardening movement, interest in the gardening practices of the urban poor expanded well beyond the exhibitions themselves. Alongside numerous reports of flower shows, the press began to publish articles and essays that transferred the exhibitionary gaze to the everyday streetscape. In this emerging genre – including pieces titled ‘Window-gardening in the East-End’, ‘Flowers in slumland’ and ‘Flowers in the east’Footnote ⁸⁵ – window gardens were portrayed as objects inviting scrutiny. These accounts rarely acknowledged the possibility that such displays were intentionally crafted to be seen and admired. Instead, the interpretive agency was assigned solely to the vigilant passer-by, whose gaze alone could decipher the hidden truths of working-class life. Thus, the cultural logic of the flower show extended into the broader urban imaginary: gardens on sills were treated as social indices, offering clues to the private circumstances of those behind the glass.

In the late 1880s and 1890s, when Charles Booth conducted the monumental social survey of London, plants were already established as social indicators. Booth’s investigators meticulously documented their walks, assigning social evaluations according to his now-famous colour-coded taxonomy – from the wealthy (yellow) to the ‘vicious, semi-criminal’ (black). To support these classifications, they not only questioned local residents but also relied heavily on visual cues. Among these, the condition and contents of windows proved especially telling: broken, cracked, patched or ‘filled with many evil faces’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Window plants appear repeatedly as diagnostic signs. One entry on a poor court in Southwark, for instance, notes: ‘Attention paid to flowers, Virginian creepers in window boxes, fine hydrangea in another window ledge.’Footnote ⁸⁷

Booth’s notebooks record a wide range of such observations, from ‘few flowers’ in a lower-middle-class home, to ‘bunches of country flowers’, a ‘fine show of flowers’ or ‘struggling pots and tins of flowers’ among the very poor.Footnote ⁸⁸ In some cases, it was not the presence but the absence of plants that drew comment.Footnote ⁸⁹ Yet the interpretation of window displays was not always reducible to a simple binary. One ‘pink’-coded home (indicating fairly comfortable circumstances), for example, was noted to have no flowers but displayed ‘China pots with evergreen fern’ at its front windows.Footnote ⁹⁰ Such nuances, which seem puzzling to the modern reader, point to a now-lost complexity in how window displays were once interpreted, suggesting that their meanings were more complex and culturally legible than they might appear today.

Screening and projecting

The awareness of being seen from the street, whether real or imagined, was not confined to the external perspective but was equally acknowledged from within. The window display, with its plants, played a significant role in the construction of the home, a central tenet of Victorian middle-class ideology.Footnote ⁹¹ As Thad Logan observed, decorative practice served a dual purpose: creating familial intimacy while crafting a social identity to external observers.Footnote ⁹² Positioned at the threshold, plants fulfilled both functions, fortifying the domestic space while offering carefully curated signs to the street.

Constructing domesticity primarily relied on establishing marked boundaries between the home and its surroundings.Footnote ⁹³ Privacy and segregation became defining ideals, reinforced through gates, fences and hedges. Yet in urban settings, the window remained a vulnerable point of exposure.Footnote ⁹⁴ At a time when ‘window-shopping’ became a popular pastime, shielding the home from strangers’ eyes grew increasingly important.

Curtains and screens blocked intrusive views and secured privacy, but also darkened interiors.Footnote ⁹⁵ Window plants offered an elegant compromise: placed near or on the sill, they filtered visibility without obstructing light. Positioned at the threshold between private and public realms, the plant was a liminal entity. This complex status is exposed when it was addressed not only as a part of the home, but also as a stranger ‘peeping in upon us in the privacy of our dwelling’.Footnote ⁹⁶ In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), the two leafy geraniums alongside the curtains are portrayed as a line of defence against ‘outdoor pryers’.Footnote ⁹⁷

In addition to protecting domestic privacy, plants improved the view from within by screening the cityscape. Window gardens were presented as sophisticated blinds, shielding the home from the external gaze while still allowing light and air to enter.Footnote ⁹⁸ Particularly effective for this purpose were Wardian cases, enclosed glass containers for growing plants that could be fitted directly to windows, and, in the words of the horticulturist John Loudon, serve as a ‘substitute for bad view’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Nathaniel B. Ward, the designer of these cases, praised them as ‘the most beautiful blinds that can be imagined’, effectively obscuring the view while still admitting light.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Window gardens rendered an alternative, improved outlook: instead of looking ‘upon dingy walls and tenements’, one might ‘refresh his eye with the prospect of ferns or flowers’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In a similar vein, Hibberd suggested that window views be ‘blotted out by something better’Footnote ¹⁰² and The Country Gentlewoman suggested that proper window gardens ‘might serve to make us forget, now and again, that we are destined to dwell in cities’.Footnote ¹⁰³

The functionality of the window garden was also considered in relation to its visibility from the street.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ More than a visual barrier, it was meant to form a ‘spot of brightness’ for every passer-by and its cultivation was framed as an act of ‘public charity’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Contemporary illustrations of window gardens often stage a dual perspective, showing arrangements as seen from within the home as well as from the street. In the heavily illustrated The New Practical Window Gardener, images repeatedly shift between interior and exterior viewpoints, visualizing the display’s bidirectional function (Figure 3).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Well-established displays were believed to inspire imitation, gradually transforming a street or neighbourhood, a dynamic that might be seen as an inverted form of the ‘broken window’ theory.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Figure 3.

A window garden from the exterior and interior. J.R. Mollison, The New Practical Window Gardener (London, 1877), frontispiece and plate facing 32. Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, contributed by Cornell University Library.

Figure 3. Long description

Two vertical panels are presented side-by-side.

Left Panel: Window Garden - Exterior.

An arched window is set into a yellow stone wall. A decorative wooden planter box with a blue and red crisscross pattern sits at the base. The window is framed by a trellis arch covered in climbing greenery and pink roses. Inside the window, behind dark curtains, a tall white lily stands centrally. The planter box is filled with a dense variety of colorful flowers including yellow, red, and blue blooms. To the left of the arch, tall green and reddish-brown foliage plants grow vertically.

Right Panel: Window Garden - Interior.

Viewed from inside a room, dark patterned lace curtains frame a large rectangular window. On the windowsill, a row of small pink and yellow flowers is planted. In front of the window, a tiered wooden plant stand holds three potted plants. The central, highest tier holds a tall white lily with yellow centers, identical to the one seen in the exterior view. The lower tiers hold green ferns and leafy plants. Through the glass, a garden with a greenhouse and tall cypress trees is visible under a cloudy sky.

Text at the bottom of the left panel reads WINDOW GARDEN - EXTERIOR. Text at the bottom of the right panel reads WINDOW GARDEN - INTERIOR.

By the 1870s and 1880s, the sill was increasingly recognized as a site of deliberate display, a miniature stage projecting the household outwards. Window gardens were no longer seen merely as spontaneous expressions of identity or functional features; they became sites for curating taste and self-presentation.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ They provided a means to keep the home’s ‘look-out’ expressive of ‘all our indoor elegancies’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The idea that the window garden, with its plants, was an integral part of the indoors, resonates with a broader conception of a porous boundary between home and garden. As Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith show, the nineteenth-century garden became a ‘domesticated landscape’, a space in which domestic ideals and practices were projected outwards beyond the built environment. In the urban context, window gardens were considered direct extensions of the interior.Footnote ¹¹⁰

This change was articulated in an 1887 article, which observed that 40 years earlier, it was not customary to display anything toward the street. Now, it was argued, a new mode of urban exhibitionism emerges. The street ‘was to be admitted to admire our taste’, and ‘perfect liberty has been proclaimed; we are free to dress our windows as we like’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Consequently, window design should no longer be guided by professional florists but rather by ‘personal taste’.Footnote ¹¹² Similarly, as an 1881 gardening book asserted, window gardening was no longer a matter of ‘a few desultory attempts’ to place plants on sills, but an ‘art’: creating a window that was ‘at the same time an object of interest and an ornament’.Footnote ¹¹³

An 1876 article, mentioned earlier, linked window plants directly to exhibitionism. The ‘love of admiration’, it argued, is not reprehensible, since the ‘gratification of the self’ naturally includes the ‘gratifications of others’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Among the various ways to attract the ‘approving glance’ of a stranger, cultivating a window garden is described as ‘the most harmless and least obtrusive’. At the heart of this apologetic argument lies a key assumption: the cultivator, though genuinely fond of plants, is equally fond of being admired. Otherwise, ‘he would put his most charming specimens anywhere else, quite as willingly as in his most conspicuous window. It is not for him that full many a flower is born to blush unseen.’ In conclusion, there are two parties to be gratified: ‘the great world outside the window, and the small private knot within it’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The allusion to Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’ – specifically the line ‘full many a flower is born to blush unseen’ – signals a telling shift.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Whereas Gray lamented the obscurity of rural lives, the urban window gardener embraced visibility, placing his ‘most charming specimens’ not to wither in private, but to be seen, admired and interpreted from the street.Footnote ¹¹⁷ After defending window gardening as a two-sided display, the article adopts a theatrical semantic and rationale. First, the window is cast as a stage on which the ‘show’ unfolds. Second, to maintain ‘an unflagging reputation’, a hidden window space is needed where the plant-actors ‘can retire after they have played their part’. These actors fall into two categories: annual, which ‘will scarcely appear on the stage more than once’, and perennial, which require only a brief intermission to regain their strength: ‘After a brilliant, perhaps prolonged and exhausting, floral, vocal, or dramatic display, they require an interval of repose, to recruit their strength before beginning to show off again.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ A similar attentiveness to the external gaze appears in Charlotte Coke’s housekeeping manual. The house’s mistress should design the window display so ‘the outside of her home should give sound hints of its inner beauties’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Coke admits that

Just as palaeontologists reconstruct extinct creatures from fragments, urban passers-by could use fenestral clues to reveal the hidden romances of city life.