Indoor plants bring many benefits to your home — they purify the air, are known stress-relievers, and can even be considered company to those experiencing feelings of loneliness.
But aside from their benefits to our body and minds, plants serve an essential, practical purpose in the home. For starters, they can add significant value to the cost of your home and can do well to block out an invasive window view. But plants can also serve as art and decor in your home, and if you’re not yet getting creative with the ways you display your plants, then it’s time you found out a little more.
We’ve already shown you how to create a hanging plant wall with tension rods. It’s a perfect solution for displaying heaps of plants at once and is particularly good for renters, who may not be able to drill hooks into their temporary walls. Now, we bring you the vertical garden.
Vertical gardens offer the chance to showcase heaps of greenery at once in an artistic and impactful display. They’re cost-effective, especially when you consider the individual price of pots, and are great for the plants you fill them with too. In fact, it’s much harder to kill plants that live in a garden wall (great news for black thumbs).
“Vertical Gardens use a unique system that is extremely intuitive and low maintenance, which is designed to help plants thrive. It is also a great option if you aren’t quite at the botanist level of plant knowledge yet,” Prue Glazebrook, director at Urban Eden, tells The Latch.
“Your plants will naturally grow roots through the base of their sleeve, and take only as much water as they require. This means you don’t need worry about the age-old concern of over or under watering them.”
Being that they bring height and dimension to a space (Urban Eden’s vertical garden is 1.16m high with six plant shelves) vertical gardens can serve as a focal piece, bringing style, stillness and calm to your home.
As natural greenery is known to settle the mind, Glazebrook recommends putting yours somewhere where your mental health would benefit from it. “Since plants are amazing for instilling a sense of calmness, it would be great to place it somewhere where you could reap those benefits. Think in your home office, bedroom, or yoga/meditation area.
“We also love the idea of putting it in an area of your home that needs a boost of visual interest, since the Vertical Garden adds a huge aesthetic punch.”
Then, it’s a matter of filling in the troughs with the appropriate plants for the room. Remember, lighting and airflow play a huge role in the success of your plants, so don’t simply fill your vertical garden with any old plants. Really consider the space and choose varieties whose needs will be met by the sun exposure and moisture in that area.
“We would recommend first deciding where you will put your Vertical Garden, and figure out what type of light you will get there (full sun, partial sun or full shade). Then you can select plants that will thrive in that environment. We definitely encourage you to mix in as many plant varieties as you can, this will add majorly to the visual interest of the garden,” Glazebrook says.
As for her picks? “We are huge fans of combining plants that vary in colour and texture for visual interest. Calatheas are one of our favourites, their leaves are beautiful and there are quite a few varieties of them. Pothos are very hardy and look great as they drape down the Vertical Garden.”
Urban Eden’s Vertical Garden will set you back $258. It comes in both black and white with six vertical planters.
Read more stories from The Latch and subscribe to our email newsletter.