Living wall systems for indoor walls - best living wall panels
Artificial living wall or a growing one, and what each type costs, how much light it needs and how a living wall goes on the wall.
A living wall means several quite different products, and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest is not a gap in quality. It is a gap in how much of the build is already done. What suits you comes down to the light your wall gets and how much watering you want to be doing.
Artificial living wall or the growing kind
The choice between an artificial living wall and a growing one is a choice of material, not of quality. An artificial living wall is moulded plastic and nothing ever happens to it. A preserved panel is real plant material treated so it holds its look, and it has stopped growing. A growing wall carries on growing, so it uses light and water.
You will see the same plastic product sold as a fake living wall, a faux living wall or a plastic living wall. The words are interchangeable and none of them is alive.
A moss living wall sits in the preserved column. That is worth saying plainly, because moss panels are usually sold as the low-maintenance plant option. Preserved moss asks nothing of you because it is not alive, and that is a fair trade if you know you are making it.
The question that decides it is whether daylight reaches the wall you have in mind. A windowless hallway is a genuine case for an artificial panel. If daylight does reach it and you can get to it with a watering can, the growing kind is the only one of the three that changes over a year.
What a living wall costs
A living wall costs what it does because of how much of the build is already finished, not because of the quality of the finish. The cheapest option is artificial living wall panels, sold by the square metre and clipped together by you.
A self-build living wall kit costs more. You get the troughs or modules and a way to water them, then buy and plant the plants yourself, so the listing price is rarely the finished price. A finished piece that arrives already planted costs more again, because the plants and the planting are in the price as well as the frame.
An installed facade has no catalogue price at all. It comes as a quote per square metre, with irrigation and a maintenance contract included. A clipped-together panel and an installed wall are not the same purchase at two prices, and comparing them on the number alone leads to the wrong buy.
Living wall kits and planters, or a finished frame
Once you have settled on growing plants, the next fork is how much of the building you want to do. Four formats cover almost everything on sale, and they differ mainly in what turns up and who keeps it alive.
Living wall planters are the format most people meet first, sold through most large garden retailers and watered from a reservoir rather than by hand. An indoor living wall planter and a modular living wall kit are both built to cover area, which is why they come as systems rather than as single objects.
A living wall frame does the opposite. It is one planted board, closer to a piece of living wall art than to a kit, and the choice is whether you want a project or a result. A kit is a weekend and a trip to a nursery and covers more wall for the money, while a frame like the Living Canvas arrives planted and covers one spot.
Where an indoor living wall actually works in a room
The room decides more than the system does. Living wall design starts with the wall you have, because a good frame in a dark corner fails while a cheap one by a window does fine. All of this is about indoor walls, since direct sun, wind and frost against a pocket this size are a different job.
The light you have, not the light you want
The light you actually have decides which plants will live, and it is usually less than you think. Most species that cope with a wall pocket want indirect light, which in practice is a couple of metres from a window without the sun landing on the leaves. A north-facing room works, though everything grows more slowly there.
Light drops off much faster with distance than your eye suggests, because your eye adapts and the physics does not. Extension guidance on indoor plant light puts low-light plants several feet back from an eastern window or in a northern exposure, which is a useful sanity check on any spot you are considering.
A quicker test needs no meter. If you cannot read a paperback comfortably at that spot in mid-afternoon, there is not enough light for the plant either, and that is the moment to check the plant care guide before committing.
The wall you already look at
The best wall is the one you already look at. A planted board above a sofa or beside a desk gets seen every day, and that is what makes you remember to water it. A hallway wall gets forgotten inside a fortnight.
Height matters twice. In a dim room, higher usually means further from the window, so the light drops as you raise it. And if there is a cat or a small child in the house, height decides whether the substrate stays in the pocket. Eye level or a little below is both the safest option and the best view.
How often you will actually be watering it
There is no interval in days that means anything, because light sets the pace. A bright wall dries the pocket faster and you water more often, while a north-facing room holds moisture longer. Season shifts it, but far less than the spot does.
The test that works is your finger. Extension watering guidance puts it the same way, which is to push a finger into the mix to the first joint and water if it is dry at the fingertip. The pocket holds 1.8 litres of substrate, so there is some margin. Water in measured amounts rather than soaking the pocket.
What changes when a living wall is in an office
An office living wall is the same object in a harder situation, and three things change. Who waters it when the person who bought it is on holiday. What the light does at a desk well away from the window. And what the building management will let you drill into, which on a leased floor is often nothing.
A single planted frame suits a meeting-room wall or a desk rather than a double-height atrium. For real area in a space with footfall, an interior living wall means an installed system with plumbed irrigation and somebody contracted to look after it, which is a different product from a different supplier.
Living wall plants that cope with a pocket indoors
Living wall indoor plants have to survive a pocket that dries faster than a pot on the floor. What decides it is the root ball and the tolerance for swinging between damp and dry, so you want small roots, leaves that do not demand direct sun, and a plant that forgives being forgotten. Most plants for a living wall come from the same short list.
- Pothos. The most reliable place to start. Extension guidance has it preferring bright indirect light but tolerating lower conditions, with the caveat that variegated varieties lose some colouring in the dark.
- ZZ plant. Bulbous rhizomes store water, which is why it survives low light and long gaps. The flip side is that overwatering causes root rot, so it wants the drier top of the pocket.
- String of hearts. Trails over the edge and does the work of making the piece read as a picture rather than a planter. It wants more light than pothos and considerably less water.
- Snake plant. Upright shapes if you want height in the arrangement, and near-total tolerance of neglect. It rots from the base in a pocket kept wet, so it is the wrong choice if you tend to overwater.
- Peperomia. Small roots, thick leaves and a size that stays put, which is what this space asks for. It prefers to dry out between waterings and drops leaves if it does not.
If hanging plants without drilling is what you were actually after, that is a separate question, and what each fixing holds is where the numbers are.
What we measured on a living wall, and what we did not
Nearly everything written about living walls comes from somebody selling one, so it is worth separating what can be shown from what has not been established. The banner fabric behind the figures below is documented on the materials page, and the measurements come from measuring rather than from a supplier's claim.
Conclusion - Living walls
Pick the wall first and be honest about its light. If daylight reaches it without the sun landing on it, and you can get to it with a watering can without moving furniture, a growing living wall works there. If it is an interior hallway with no window, an artificial panel is the right buy and the reading was not wasted.
References