City Beautification

City Beautification with Boxes and Planters

Plant containers make cities and towns more attractive. Often installed and maintained by local governments, but women's clubs and chambers of commerce also cooperate in this civic project. Window boxes on city buildings, plant boxes in front of libraries and courthouses, planters in parks and public gardens, as well as hanging baskets on lampposts, help make a city beautiful.

New buildings are often equipped with planters. Spacious, free-standing types with permanent trees and shrubs now adorn many parks and small squares. In public places, their broad copings provide a resting place for strollers.

Flower Baskets

Flower baskets are charming on the lampposts of the lovely seacoast town of Camden, Maine, probably the first in the country to adopt them. Hanging baskets are now established features of other cities and towns.

The Camden project started when Edward Bok admired the flower baskets on the lampposts of Leamington, England. From photographs which he had brought back, he had a local blacksmith make thirteen similar baskets and presented them to the town in 1925. They were planted and cared for by the Camden Garden Club, and during the thirties their number was increased to thirty-three. Secured to the posts with clamps, the baskets are attached high enough not to interfere with tall trucks that park along the curbs.

The baskets are lined with sphagnum moss before planting and then filled with good soil. A local nursery plants and puts them up before Memorial Day and removes the plants in the fall. In the summer, the baskets are watered and fed by firemen, who are paid by the Garden Club. For years, the baskets were filled with greens and red berries for the winter months, but since 1955 they have been enlivened with lighted Christmas trees, a gay sight for motorists who drive through.

This project is the result of the combined efforts of the Camden Garden Club, the town, and the Chamber of Commerce. Though Leamington, England, provided the inspiration, this city no longer has flower baskets. Bombed during the last war, the new concrete lampposts are without such ornament. Victoria's Graceful Baskets
Also famous for its hanging baskets is the city of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, Canada. The lamppost baskets of Camden do not hang, but in Victoria they do; they are suspended twenty inches from the lamp standards on iron arms placed eleven feet or more above the sidewalks and usually parallel to the curb for reasons of safety. Each basket, weighing up to seventy pounds, is thirteen inches wide and eleven inches deep and is constructed of twelve-gauge galvanized wire on a nine-gauge frame.

Since 1937, baskets have decorated Victoria's business districts and sections bordering the picturesque inner harbor. After a trial of various plants these are now grown: the ivy-leaved geranium Enchantress, dwarf petunia Rose Queen, lobelia Sapphire, schizanthus Giant Blotched, dwarf coreopsis Dazzler, viscaria Rose Beauty, Mexican marigold Golden Gem, variegated ground ivy, and nasturtium Hermine Grashoff. Except for geraniums and nasturtiums, all plants are raised from seed. The schizanthus, nasturtiums and petunias are at their height early in the season, the viscaria in July, while the others come later. The soil mixture consists of two parts peat, two parts sand and nine parts sterilized rotted turf loam, supplementedwith two ounces of ground limestone, two ounces of superphosphate, and one ounce of sulphate of potash per bushel of mixture.

Method of Watering

According to Mr. W. H. Warren, Park Administrator, "the baskets are maintained by one man with a right-hand tank truck powered by a take-off gear from the truck's motor. He waters the baskets during the hours of 11 P.M. to 7:30 A.M., six days a week, as he drives along the curb with an aluminum pipe wand shaped like a shepherd's crook. Liquid fertilizer is supplied every two or three weeks in the form of a three pound ammophos (16-20-0) per gallon tank."

To make watering more effective, a two-inch strip of galvanized iron runs around the top of each basket inside the moss and above the soil level. This prevents loss of water over the sides. To conserve moisture, a size thirty-four tin wash basin, treated with roofing cement on the inside and always kept full of water, is attached to the bottom. Baskets are prepared in the greenhouse in April and displayed on the lampposts from early June to early October.