Planting Inside Out: Window Gardening and Civil Rights in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Philadelphia

Today's window boxes in Philadelphia are a result of successive window-gardening campaigns undertaken by female reformers and activists between the 1870s and 1970s. In the late nineteenth century, window gardening became an integral component of Progressive reform and social charity. In the mid-twentieth century, window gardening received renewed attention as a means of grassroots activism to counter urban decay resulting from racism and public disinvestment. Philadelphia's window-box activism became a model for the nation and beyond, believed to help relieve tensions between White and Black Americans. Laying out this history, this article shows how window-box charity and activism conflated ideas of femaleness, morality, naturalness, and beauty. Plants and window boxes were both central and incidental in female urban reform and renewal efforts, and they were relational. They forged ties between people as well as between people and plants, creating relationships between indoor and outdoor space, the domestic and public realms, urban centers and their hinterland. Although window boxes and their plants were catalysts of neighborhood change, they also helped to camouflage, and quite literally naturalize, larger social problems whose causes could only be addressed through the political process.