How to involve foliage, greenery, and vegetation into your home
Saint Patrick’s Day is coming up this Friday, March 17, 2017. Thinking about the holiday and its association with the color green has me thinking about the versatility of the color green, and how so many interior designs are lacking the natural component that foliage and plant life can bring to any space.
Incorporating plant life into your home is one of the most effective and attractive ways to add a living dimension into your space. In too many interior design projects, plants and flowers are often an afterthought, which is unfortunate. While cleverly mixing fabrics, materials, and colors which establish a coherent design language is a great outline for creating a tasteful space, involving actual living things is a great way to prevent the space from feeling sterile or lifeless.
There’s really an endless amount of ways to involve foliage, greenery, and vegetation into your home.
Living Wall Vertical Planters
This is a very effective technique which allows you to create a hanging garden effect. Vining and draping plants can cover a lot of space and fill in a wall nicely without having to purchase a lot plants. Mosses and ferns add a very earthy, quaint, storybook-esque presence. With a vertical planter it’s generally best to aim for a tastefully understated effect. Most interior design projects using vertical planters choose a single wall, or a portion of a single wall, in a well lit room to prevent the hanging garden effect from taking over the space. Working a mossy or grassy feature into a bathroom can create a very refreshing atmosphere.
Using Foliage in an Outdoor Space
For space that are outdoors or partially outdoors, there are more possibilities for bringing foliage into your space. For partially covered patios, sunrooms, or shaded entryways, you can create unique green effects which are a hybrid of indoor and outdoor. A trellis acts like a single arch that plants can be draped over. For covered walkway effects, a pergola acts like an extended arching tunnel. Vining plants can grow around the feature to create enchanted forest effects and add a certain charm to your space that can’t be recreated using other materials or features. A trellis or pergola won’t make sense for smaller spaces or for single wall features. In this case a well placed lattice can provide similar effects. A lattice can be leaned against a wall or hung almost anywhere. Whether you’re using a trellis, pergola, or a lattice, the idea is to bring in plants which can grow mostly uninhibited to recreate the naturally wild effect found in nature. For a classic evergreen effect, smart choices for plants are Common Ivy, Yellowing Ivy, Golden Hops, Hydrangea, Coral Vine, or Creeping Fig, and for designs which bring in more variety of color, Rose Vines, Wisterias, Jasmine, Bougainvillea, and almost anything else that grows quickly and has vining tendencies.
Atriums
Atriums are garden areas enclose within a home. If your home doesn’t have an atrium built in, then this won’t be an option. An atrium allows you to create an outdoor, lattice based, hanging vine and vining wall feature that exists outside, but adds the visual effect inside your home. All of the same principles of incorporating foliage apply to atriums, but your options are expanded because the atrium is technically outdoors, but can be seen and enjoyed from within your home.
If your interior design isn’t incorporating foliage into its theme, you could be missing out on a fun feature.You can even make a freestanding version as shown above to minimize the maintenance while still receiving all of the benefits, and best of all it can be placed anywhere in your home. If you’ve been searching for ways to create a more organic presence around your home, you should start experimenting with these ideas. If you need assistance, we are always here to make any project easy and fun for you to accomplish.
