Create a living wall for your garden

If you are one of those people who desires to be on the cutting edge, you'll need to identify where you're going to install your wall garden in the next few months. It can be indoors or outside. It can be tiny succulents or feathery ferns and flamboyant bromeliads or vining tomatoes and pole beans. But the botanical specimens need to be vertical for your installation to qualify as avant-garde.

As of this week, it's never been so easy to build your own vertical garden to mount on a wall or fence. A current U.S. forerunner of the genre, Flora Grubb Gardens in San Francisco, has been installing commissioned vertical gardens composed of myriad succulents or tillandsias in wholesale-only plastic, modular panels. This week, 20-inch panels will be available to DIY consumers at www.floragrubb.com.

Flora Grubb's designs are inspired by the monumental installations first seen in Paris. A French botanist named Patrick Blanc is in demand at home and abroad for his stunning living walls, which he creates indoors and out. Demand is so high that most of his growing commissions are corporate and public projects, such as the French Embassy in New Delhi, Hotel Pershing Hall in Paris, the Marithe and Francois Girbaud store in New York and Caixa Forum Museum in Madrid. A green wall installed by Blanc in 2009 at the Tacoma Goodwill-Milgard Work Opportunity Center is his first exterior project in the United States.

Blanc combines a metal frame, a PVC sheet for rigidity and to protect the surface behind it from water damage and a felt layer made of a synthetic fiber. Rather than the plants tucked into pockets of soil, plant roots grow laterally along this material. Blanc creates an automatic drip-irrigation and fertilization system across the top of the framework. Water trickles slowly down the structure, but the felt absorbs it for the plants' use.

His commissions are planted with species chosen for each location's climate and conditions and planted in patterns so intricate that each installation looks like living abstract art.

The center of vertical gardening in the United States appears to be San Francisco, where landscape designer and Austin, Texas, native Flora Grubb (her real name) has set up shop in an eponymous storefront. Published examples of her firm's work — a residential courtyard wallscape tightly planted with tiny echeveria and flanking panels of widely spaced tillandsia, or airplants, at a hotel entrance — have rocketed her to fame among fashion-forward gardeners beyond San Francisco.

Her Web store sells fiber wall pockets, called Woolly Pockets, in multiple sizes for DIY vertical plantings. The store displays multiple pockets linked together and suspended from the ceiling — one side is planted part-sun and the other for its full-sun exposure.

The 20-inch squares of tiny planting cells, sloped up to better contain the planting medium and water, will allow gardeners to create any combination of panels to fill an indoor or outdoor space. Each panel costs $99.95 and can accommodate irrigation fittings.

"We've been contacted by hundreds of do-it-yourselfers who've seen our vertical gardens and who wanted to build one themselves," Flora Grubb writes in an e-mail. "The Woolly Pocket system makes a hip jungle-on-a-wall look and, starting this week, we're thrilled to start selling the same modular panels we use to create the vertical succulent gardens that people love so much."