Living walls, or pictures, have really taken off in popularity in the last two or three years. It’s easy to see why as they look spectacular but take up almost no floor space so are ideal for almost any office, showroom, or reception/entrance foyer. Irrigation systems for the larger walls, keep the plants watered and the large number of plants used produces huge amounts of oxygen. We have recently installed a large wall in Gloucester (write up imminent in the “Our Work” section of the site) and we’re thrilled with how good it looks.
For a smaller wall space or budget, the living picture offers a good option. These are manufactured by Mobilane and they offer five different sizes of a self contained system, within a frame, that just needs mounting on the wall, before the planted up cassettes are slotted in. This is then manually watered by filling up the reservoir on each maintenance visit.
The larger walls are made to order and we use a couple of different suppliers for these. Mobilane use a system of rails that are interconnected, with the plant cassettes sitting between them. These can still be manually watered, but the larger walls require an irrigation system, which Mobilane also offer. Livingreen are another supplier and their system has trays that clip on to a wall mounted frame, with the plants remaining in their pots and just sat in the trays, which are watered manually. The advantage of this system is the ease of replacing plants or mixing up the planting.
One other thing to consider, unless you are situation your wall in a position that benefits from a lot of natural light, is artificial lighting, but I will save that for another blog post!
If you are interested in a living wall but have further questions, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to talk through all the various aspects with you. Please keep an eye out for the write up on our latest install – as I said, it’s pretty spectacular!