Lifestyle

Vertical Gardening

Small area, great scope for design. Vertical Gardening turns an urban balcony into a green oasis of well-being.
Vertical Gardening

How urban gardening makes the living space on your balcony bloom.

Urban settlement areas are on the rise around the world. Cities are evolving, changing, and with new generations of city-dwellers come new ideas. For decades, urban development was always synonymous with concrete wastelands. Now, urban gardening has changed our relationship to urban living space. Cities are increasingly being enhanced with creative greening solutions. As cities grow upwards, more and more green zones are growing with them. With vertical gardens on house façades, for example, or with urban gardening zones in backyards, on patios or rooftops.

The aim is to bring something of nature and recreation back into the cities. Good residential and office building projects must be sustainable, efficient, and ecological. As well as offering what used to be supplied by green spaces and parks. No easy task. But there’s a solution: and that’s to create new worlds of well-being by making use of the house façade, roof, balcony, and patio. Biotope network systems influence the microclimate in the rooms and on the balconies, in that the choice of plants mitigates noise, dust, and heat. And creates valuable habitats for insects, birds, and people.

Garden design in vertical format.

Vertical gardening is a modern approach to urban architectural design and a hip hobby-gardening trend. It always involves house walls, balconies, patios and even interiors. The modern approach to garden design is even ideal for small front gardens and backyards. Why is it so popular?

Because a Vertical Garden creates plenty of space for plants. It makes no difference whether a professional landscape architect designs a garden world in vertical format or creative residents with a passion for DIY cover their walls with green graffiti. The basic equipment of a Vertical Gardener includes plant grids and modules, greening systems with irrigation, plastic grow bags, wooden frames, pallets, and no end of creativity.

Balkon, Pflanzen, Tisch
Water, Irrigation, Vertical Garden
Watering

No matter how big or small you want your plant wall to be, think about watering in advance. Plan a permanent wall solution with decorative planting for the whole year.

Juicy green

For decorative wall gardens indoors, you should choose easy-care plants that can tolerate room heat and cope with the lighting situation. Mosses, ferns, and succulents are usually hardy enough. They thrive in soil, hydroponics, or substrate.

Wall greening in Euro pallets for the balcony garden
Growing vertically

Practically everything that would grow well horizontally in the light conditions of a yard, garden, or balcony can also be cultivated vertically. Shallow-rooted plants are best suited.

Entry-level models

Depending on the height and area of your planned Vertical Garden, there is a choice of hanging baskets, planting frames and various flexible modules on the market. The advantage is that they are easy to plant and ideal for beginners.

Upcycling
Upcycling

Unconventional and cheaper, but often more labour-intensive, is the construction of raised beds using Euro pallets and pond liner or empty plastic bottles.

Vertical Gardening Tipp 5
Vegetable patch

If you want your Vertical Garden to give you some practical benefit, you can plant e.g. strawberries, herbs, tomatoes, peppers and chillies in planting bags, one on top of each other, to create a “snackable” wall outdoors.

Protecting your green oasis from the sun and strong winds

Whether you’re looking for modern cassette awnings combined with side shading, or vertical awnings to shade the façade combined with automated control of your home energy consumption: STOBAG has a wide range of customisable solutions to offer you.

Balkon & Loggia

Where does Vertical Gardening actually come from?

Vertical gardening is a new trend, but it is not really a recent invention. We’ve all heard of the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon”, one of the mysterious Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The ingeniously irrigated hanging gardens – which legend says were created by the ancient Oriental Queen Semiramis or King Nebuchadnezzar II – reached an enormous height.

Unlike the current trend, however, they were single terraced green spaces laid out one on top of the other. Modern garden artists such as the French botanist Patrick Blanc make deliberate use of the vertical. Blanc drew inspiration for his first gardens from the humid rock faces in the tropical regions of Southeast Asia. Since then, the botanist has implemented his ideas, which were initially derided, all around the world. In Europe, for example, he greened the façade of the European Parliament in the middle of Brussels with a kind of stone and rock garden.

Today, there are many more famous proponents of Vertical Gardening, both for outdoors and indoors. One notable example is the “Bosco Verticale” in Milan by the architectural office Boeri Studio. Boeri has created a vertical forest on two towers, 110 and 80 metres high. The towers were part of a spatial development that was all about maximum efficiency. This concept won him the International Highrise Award of EUR 50,000 in 2014.

Vertical Garden an einer Holzwand

Questions that our balcony professionals are asked every day

How much care does an awning need?
What do I have to remember when setting up a Vertical Garden?
Can I automate my awnings to create optimum growing conditions for my plants?