Books: Vertical Garden Design

How about one of these in your own garden:  a green wall covering 190 square feet, composed of 350 plants of 80 different species, including mints, sages, thymes, wormwoods, tansies, lavenders, hyssops, Santolina, bee balms and woodruffs, just to name a few.

In a new book by Noémie Vialard, Gardening Vertically: 24 Ideas for Creating Your Own Green Walls (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc), you'll find out exactly how to design and install small-scale vertical gardens for urban or suburban settings. Vialard, a friend of vertical gardening master Patrick Blanc, takes you through a series of simple steps, using Blanc's method for installing green walls.  Vialard gives you a couple of options along the way and warns that water consumption can be quite high, although if you plan carefully, you can recirculate a lot of it. 

If you're not ready to go the Patrick Blanc route, Vialard gives you plenty of other ideas: planting climbers on walls, fences and trellises; making a wall of terracotta pots; a vertical shelf system that holds containers; and even a circular container within a frame that can simply be hung on a wall.

Best of all, Vialard has created "plans" for 24 different vertical gardens that can easily be adapted for any situation. I loved the "Mosquito-Repellent Wall" featuring basil, artemisia, lemon balm, lemon verbena and other plants -- and she suggests installing it anywhere that's near the spot where you tend to sit outside. (And if you try it, let me know if it works!).  There are also salad and herb walls, a scented wall, others of mosses and ferns.

If you're not into a big investment of time and materials, Vialard shows you how, in just about two hours, to frame a door, decorate the base of a tree trunk or disguise the veg garden.

BEAUTIFUL photos and illustrations throughout. One of the most artful and inspiring books I've seen on the subject.  It belongs on every designer's bookshelf.