Austria is a windowbox

People come to the UK and marvel at our neat and well-kept gardens. But when it comes to universal tidiness and pulchritude it’s hard to beat the Austrians.

We’ve just come back from a week in Styria; to be precise, the beautiful town of Schladming which in winter hosts a round of the downhill skiing World Cup. And everywhere you go there are windowboxes with flowers tumbling out of them.

As a year-round tourist destination the good bergers are going to put a lot of effort into keeping the town fluffed up for the summer trade – mostly Germans, a few Brits and the odd Italian – but seemingly everwhere you go in the region, each alpine chalet has immaculately presented windowboxes.

We hired e.bikes (with a cheaty little electric supplement to peddle power) and ventured down less beaten tracks – and at the end of a distant, windy track would be a little mountain hut complete with perfect blue and purple trailing violas flowing out of brightly painted window boxes.

Things were so so perfect it was bordering on the spooky – were these windowboxes tended by ‘Das Stepford Wives’?

Then on one bike ride out to the Dachstein Glacier we cycled through the tiny hamlet of Birnberg and passed what could only be described as a vegetable showcase. At first sight it looked like a set-piece Chelsea garden, a wide variety of cottage garden vegetables, grown to perfection.

At the fringes were flowers – in the centre were massive savoy cabbages, there were lettuces, well…you don’t have to take my word for it, you can just see below.

But then it dawned on me. None of them had been picked. They were all grown for one great big harvest vegetable festival in the middle of August. This wasn’t a foray into alpine self-sufficiency, it was the vegetable equivalent of a window box, framed with flowers for the table. It faced out onto the main road to the side of the house, so everyone could see the tender’s proficiency at cultivation.

And no sign of slug pellets either. The Austrians don’t go in too much for occasional drizzle or that much-despised weatherman’s term, ‘spits and spots of rain’. There is either a lengthy deluge, or the sun comes into the sky like it was a remake of the Teletubbies. It’s perfect for slugs, yet there was no sign that the marauders had got a foothold in this show garden.

Austrians must have a great sense of pride in displaying their window boxes, just as they prominently display the name of the family outside their farms, guesthouses and businesses; Familie Bachler, Familie Royer, Family Tritscher were names we were constantly cycling past. With not much effort.

There must be a profound social stigma to not having your windowboxes stocked, primped and well-attended in Styria. But you’ve got to like geraniums. And chrysanthemums. And if you don't like violas, petunias or lobelia you might need to move to Switzerland.