Making a green wall – with no nails or screws

After a winter couped-up inside, I was dying inside for some greenery. Plants to love and care for. If we couldn’t have a green wall… then what?

The previous year, while still living at The Cave, we’d bought five little ivy plants (my “fivies”). I’d had big hopes for them – but it turns out they don’t grow quite so fast as I’d like (ahem, creating perfect privacy at a growth rate of 6 feet/month). So they moved with us here, and survived a record horrible winter. Fivies: strong little brutes. After proving their mettle, I tripled the supply with some bodge-job cuttings… and when spring hit, we bought a trellis. They’d add something green to an ugly corner.

March – moment of installation:

And now – 6 months later:

Fivies and friends are filling in nicely. While sparse in places they do reach the trellis top and are growing at a clip. It’s not a green wall, but it’s green on a wall. It’ll do.

Nail-free construction: I managed to rig the trellis without a single nail or screw into the walls (that we’re forbidden from touching – woo strata living). The fivies are in a rectangular plastic container, placed inside the larger wooden one. There’s an inch gap between the two – wide enough to shove the trellis legs inside. The weight of a full box is enough to keep it in place – a totally happy accident.

Extra specially good?

1. The trellis has added exactly the English country garden edge I need while biding time in an apartment.
2. Fivies stay green through the winter. Not much else in the current photo will.
3. Rather than the green wall I wanted (a fully fledged contraption with hoses and tubes and pumps), the trellis is perfectly temporary. Nothing’s attached to anything and we can grab it and move it at a minute’s notice.

So – staging decisions – keep it in place for a future open house or stash it in storage?

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Top photo credit to Brandon Warren via Flickr Creative Commons