The Complete Guide To Vertical Landscaping
If you’re looking to start a vertical garden, you’re in the right place.
Whether it’s to save space, or just to be able to fit more plants in your garden, vertical gardens offer plenty of benefits.
Moreover, when done right, they look just as good as normal gardens.
This guide will cover everything you need to know about vertical landscaping, from the various types and styles, to how to
design, install, and maintain them.
So if you’re ready to become an expert in vertical gardens, jump right in!
1. Why Vertical Landscaping?
Before we even begin on how to implement a vertical landscape, this section will help you make up your mind on whether or not it’s the right choice for you.
Space Efficiency
The most obvious benefit is that vertical gardens maximize space. If you have four layers, you can grow four times as many plants. If you have five layers, you can grow five times as many plants.
For small spaces, this means you don’t have to limit the number of plants you have just because you have a smaller space. For larger spaces, this means you have more space for other elements, whether it’s a water feature or a patio.
Noise Reduction
The nature of vertical gardens means plants are closely packed together, making them effective noise barriers. This can be very useful if you’re in a metropolitan area with heavy traffic, or just near anywhere noisy.
Effective Air Purifiers
Again, given how compact their arrangements are, while normal gardens are already effective air purifiers, vertical gardens are even more effective
Insulation
Once again, regular landscapes are great aids in keeping your environment from harsh weather, but due to the higher density of plants in vertical gardens, they’re even better at keeping your home cool on hot days, and warm on cooler days.
Easier Maintenance
Finally, given the central arrangement of your plants where they’re all in one place, this saves you the effort of having to walk around to water your plants. It’s also easier to set up irrigation systems.
2. Types Of Vertical Gardens
If you’re still reading, I’m guessing you’re sold on vertical gardens, so the next step is to decide which type you want. Here are the various types of vertical landscapes.
Pocket Gardens
Pocket gardens are exactly what they sound like, layers of fabric or mesh pockets, each filled with soil or some other growing medium and functioning as a mini pot.
This is the easiest type of vertical garden, as the structure itself is actually soft since it’s either fabric or mesh, and you basically hang them from wherever you want to.
Living Walls
Living walls are like more sophisticated pocket gardens. Living walls are literally hard structures of walls with prebuilt pockets. Given that these are more solid structures, they can be more sophisticated, so the insides are often equipped with irrigation and drainage systems.
Hydroponic Walls
Hydroponic walls are vertical gardens that use a water solution with nutrients to grow plants instead of soil. While less conventional, they are actually very water-efficient, and you can grow a wide range of plant species in them.
Structure-wise, there isn’t a fixed way to do it. Some people use shelves of solution-filled boxes, while others even use pipes.
Trellis Walls
Trellis walls are essentially structures made of lattices or wires used for climbing plants like vines. They can come in a variety of shapes, but the most common shapes is simply the checker shape.
Freestyle
While the above-mentioned types are the generally known ones, there are many others that aren’t specifically named. These include vertical gardens where shelves are attached to walls and pots placed on them, ones where you hang pots onto walls, and so on.
Anything that’s vertical and has plants is a vertical garden, and given the infinite ways you can suspend plants in the air, there’s no way to name them all. If you have a preferred way for aesthetics or just to fit in with your home structure, feel free to do it your way. It’s not necessary to follow a named style just for the sake of it.
3. Deciding On The Plants
When it comes to vertical gardens, you want plants that either stay small or can be pruned to stay small. Otherwise, they’re not going to fit in the small pots that your vertical garden has. That’s pretty much the only requirement for vertical gardens. The rest depends on your needs.
Besides the usual considerations for aesthetics, maintenance, and how the plants will fit with the local climate, you need to consider your needs. Do you want climbing plants, edible plants, low-maintenance plants, or ones that can purify the air?
Carefully consider what you want your plants to do and what you need and weigh their pros and cons.
4. Design
Now that you know which plants you want, you need to decide which type of vertical garden you want based on your aesthetics, ease of installation, and needs.
Once you’ve decided, there really isn’t much to take note of. The most important thing to get right is the irrigation and drainage.
For irrigation, you can of course do it by hand, but if you want your garden to be more hands-free, you’ll need an irrigation system of some sort. There are various options, such as drip irrigation systems, self-watering inserts, and even misting systems, so do your research on your plants’ needs and see which ones to implement.
For drainage, make sure whether it’s a pocket or a pot, there are drainage holes at the bottom, and a tray of some sort that can collect and reuse the excess water. Hydroponic systems are much more complex and require lots of explanation, so if you intend to go that route, you will need to do the research yourself.
5. Maintenance
Moving on to maintenance, I skipped installation as the installation is generally pretty straightforward, even without instructions.
For maintenance, it’s the same as you would with a regular garden. The only other thing to look out for is the structural integrity. The weight of the pots, the soil, the water, and the plants themselves can add up to be quite a bit, so make sure to check for signs of wear and tear or degradation.
To ensure your structure lasts longer, make sure to use durable materials and don’t try to skimp on it by using cheaper materials.
If your vertical garden is too tall for you to reach, it’s also a good idea to automate the irrigation and fertilization to reduce the demands of maintenance.
6. Vertical Landscape Styles
Earlier, we covered the different structures. Now, let’s talk styles.
While you won’t be able to have a full on cottage garden or Zen garden, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with just boring rows of plants.
Besides using a variety of different colored flowering plants, here are two interesting ways to set up your vertical garden.
Interactive Walls
One of the coolest ways to use a vertical landscape is to make it interactive. You can install lights and sensors such that when people hover their hand over a certain part of the wall, it lights up or flashes, or something like that.
While it certainly takes more work and thought to set up, once everything is installed, it can really be a thing to behold and will definitely wow your guests.
Artistic Walls
This particular style only works with living walls because your plants need to be touching each other and packed closely together. You basically use the various shades of green to create patterns, shapes, and even images.
This style does have some level of difficulty to it, but is sure to impress any visitor to your home.
7. Placement
Unlike normal gardens that usually have to be grown outdoors and are rather limited in their positioning, the compact nature of vertical gardens means you can fit them into many places and they can be quite versatile.
You can consider placing them:
- As partitions: Vertical walls are walls after all, and can function just like one. You can use them to segregate your area and split it up into different sections, or even use them as the walls for your outdoor living area like your patio.
- Indoors: You’ll probably have seen at least one instance of a company that had plants on their walls either at the staircases or even around the office. Incorporating greenery inside an office itself helps give the office more life and make it feel less monotonous and dead. Likewise, you can also have living walls in your home
- Around the exteriors: Filling the exterior of your office or home with greens not only purifies the air, but helps insulate the interior too.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you’ve by now decided which vertical landscape to implement, where to place it, and know exactly how to make it work.
One of my favorite ways to use vertical gardens is to grow crops or edible plants, because their compactness allows me to yield good returns with only a little space. And when I have a good amount of space, I like to have multiple vertical gardens so that I can maximize my yields.
As a final tip, if you’re going to have multiple vertical landscapes like me, make sure they all get enough sunlight, or you might have to supplement them with grow lights.
Happy growing!
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