On the Up and Up: Overcoming Green Wall Challenges

Challenge 1: Creating instant greenery
Solution: Install a modular system

“The great thing about green walls is they look beautiful immediately; you don’t have to wait for the plants to grow to look good,” says Architect Lainey Richardson of Elaine Richardson Architect. Richardson installed a green wall along the boundary wall of this inner-city terrace house, for high-impact greenery that didn’t take up a lot of space. Using the Atlantis Gro-Wall 4 modular system with built-in irrigation, the effect was immediate.

While you have a green wall straight away, it may take some time and experimentation to determine which plants are best to use. Each environment may require a different collection of plants, so take a picture of the site and get some advice from a local nursery. For this project, the plants are quite small and the landscaper recommended the plant types. “Although he also advised us that while some plants would love the location, others would not, and whole species may need to be replaced,” says Richardson.

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Challenge 3: Keeping plants alive and growing
Solution: Choose your plants carefully

This green wall in the home of architect David Saunders of S2 Design has been through several incarnations, the challenge being to keep the plants alive and well. Seasons, climate variations and small container sizes all made this difficult.

“We started with a mixture of ferns, which we found impossible to keep alive throughout our extreme seasonal climatic variations. The following option was succulents, mainly aloe species, that thrived. Now, an assortment of bromeliads has been introduced among the aloes, which has added a gorgeous range of colours and textures across the wall,” Saunders explains.

For this vertical garden by a pool, MacMinn attached the individual pockets to a masonry wall and slightly overlapped each of them to create a solid mass. “I used two rows of 3 x 5 pockets for a total of thirty 300 x 600 millimetre pockets,” MacMinn explains. “It was a hot wall so I sourced succulents that could cope with the heat. I used Agave attenuata, walking iris (Neomarica), blue chalk sticks and Limonium perezii [see above]. A year later, I replaced the blue plants with Euphorbia tirucalli or firesticks for a colour pop.”

Challenge 5: There is no wall to affix containers to
Solution: Build a wall with creepers and hanging plants

This wall may not have the solid mass of greenery as other green walls but it’s still a stunning way to create a green wall, and one you can keep adding to over time. Architect Ahmad Abas of Gresley Abas Architects created a wall with horizontal boards of recycled jarrah timber. Leaving a 10 to 15 millimetre gap between each board allowed room to affix the pots and planters to any position on the wall. “Creepers and hanging plants offered the best effect for allowing greenery to spread across the wall,” says Abas.

Challenge 6: The property has an overgrown ivy-covered wall
Solution: Make it a design feature

This Melbourne home had a brick boundary wall covered with lush green ivy that Emilio Fuscaldo of Nest Architects wanted to maintain during the renovation and construction. However, Fuscaldo didn’t just retain the ivy, he made it a design feature for the living space with just a little trimming and shaping.

“The ivy played a big part in the sizing of that window, and the orientation of the room,” Fuscaldo says. “In fact, given that the green wall was such a lovely element, we were able to ‘open’ up the room toward that boundary wall (which is only one metre away) and reduce the tunnelling effect that having views only toward the rear would have created.”

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Challenge 7: Wanting a low-maintenance green wall
Solution: Go faux

Not everyone has the magic touch when it comes to plants, especially when it comes to green walls. So why not just fake it, as interior designer Revy Bryce-Browning did in this Woolstore apartment. Bryce-Browning installed this green wall, which is made from plastic leaves attached to a backing board that, placed together, looks real and requires no water. “It was designed to mirror the green courtyard,” says Bryce-Browning, “and to add texture and a non-colour so as not to compete with the warm monochromatic scheme, but rather to cool it down.”