Growing a Living Wall of Plants
A living wall is a garden of its own. Dreaming of one, planting, and tending one can be a humbling experience. It’s easy to see and enjoy the successes, but it’s equally important to roll with, and learn from the failures.
Why Create a Living Wall?
Living walls, also known as green walls or vertical gardens, offer educational value, horticultural innovation, aesthetic appeal, and mental health benefits for the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden visitors.
- Educational Value Living walls are a great educational tool. They showcase different plant combinations and demonstrate how vertical gardening can be adapted to bring various concepts to life.
- Horticultural Innovation Living walls showcase a wide variety of plants in a compact space, including herbaceous annuals, perennials, and even seasonally relevant change-outs.
- Aesthetic Appeal Living walls provide a striking visual element creating eye-catching features. They are versatile and gaining in popularity partly because they are perfect for rooms short on space, adding texture and greenery to unlikely places.
- Mental Health Benefits The presence of living walls has been shown to have positive effects on mental well-being including stress reduction, improved mood, enhanced creativity and cognitive function.
What Goes Into Growing a Living Wall?
The Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden Wall wall holds 1,384 plants and we grow out about 1,700 to cover replacement plants. They are purchased as small plugs, and with the help of our great volunteers, potted up within days of arriving to grow out and be ready to be placed in the Living Wall Installation. But it all really starts with an idea.
Concepting the Idea
We look over current and past photos of the wall’s many different iterations. We track where the difficult spots are, to make sure to put plants where they have the best chance of thriving. Happier plants means fewer replacements! Beyond finding the best location, we want these plants to look FANTASTIC together. We use contrasting foliage, textures, and leaf colors to make the wall really POP!
This year’s design kept coming back to smaller groupings of foliage textures and colors. The plan landed with the idea of a tropical-esque prairie. Beyond the concept we thought: what else would make it feel like a prairie? Pollinators! This had us looking into the individual plants and the pollinators they use. Suddenly we saw an incredible amount of crossover along with a really cool visual story to tell.
Ordering the Plants
Ordering and designing go hand in hand. We pay attention to the very real microclimates that make up the living wall. The top portion of the wall is closer to the lights, so those plants stay pretty hot and dry out quickly. As you move down the wall, the plants receive less light and tend to hold moisture for longer periods.
Finding the Right Growers
We connect with hundreds of growers from across the country to explore if they have anything new. Some growers require multiple cases of plants being ordered, some allow partial cases, some have higher shipping costs, or specific shipping weeks. On top of this, we order tiny, tender tropical plants to be shipped to Iowa…in January and February. You might say ordering is a tall order unto itself.
It’s that Time of Year
The Prairie Meadows Living Wall is set to evolve this April 14. Make sure to make time to stop by the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden to see it for yourself and to learn more about this year’s Living Wall focus—Tropical Prairie Pollinators!
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