In Summer of 2021, my partner and I decided that we needed to put something up on big open wall in our dining room. After going back and forth on what wall art we could put up, we had the idea to put a bunch of wall planters up. I've heard that wall planters can be a pain to make look good, but we figured we'd give it a try. In particular we were worried that there wouldn't be enough light, and we didn't want to deal with drainage so we needed plants that were okay with wet roots.

Selecting the planters

We found some wall planters on Etsy that we liked. We bought four circular planters, where the bottom half of the circle is the planter, and four more standard pot planters with wall mounts. It took a while to figure out how we wanted to lay them out on the wall, but eventually we landed on a layout we liked. For the standard planters I could just throw them on the wall and then just put smaller plastic planter pots inside. For the circular ones I couldn't fit a plastic pot into them, as they had an unusual shape. I also didn't want to plant in them directly as I was pretty sure it was going to take some trial and error to find plants that would thrive in that space. Additionally, since they are screwed to the wall I would have to do the potting up against the wall in the dining room, which would make a mess.

Designing inner planters

The solution I went with for this was 3D printing inner planters. There are a few nice things about this solution. First, I got to choose exactly how deep the planters were, as I didn't want to have dirt going all the way to the bottom of the circle. This way, if the plants were over-watered, the water wouldn't be touching the dirt/roots. Second, I could split the planter into two sides, so I could plant two plants per planter, and if one wasn't doing well, I could remove it without messing with the one that was happy.

Modeling the planters was fairly straightforward given the geometric shape of the outer planter. One annoyance was discovering that the circular planters we bought were all slightly different dimensions (I originally only measured one for depth, assuming they were all the same), but I was able to use the incorrectly sized planter as a parts bin, and I had modeled them parametrically, so making slightly different planters for each one was easy. I also modeled the spacers for the bottom of the circle, which would hold the planters up and allow water to flow around them.

Selecting plants

All that was left was to go to the nursery and choose out some low-light plants. I knew we were going to have to try a bunch of plants before we found ones that could thrive in the conditions of our dining room, so I mostly just tried to find interesting plants that I thought had a chance, but I didn't do too much research ahead of time.

Training the vines

As the pothos grew I printed some small hooks to run the vines along the wall.

These worked well for a year or so, but then started breaking along the layers. An MechE friend of mine suggested that I print them at an angle to increase the layer area, and that worked well.

Two years later

It's now been two years, and I'm pretty happy with how it looks. Some of the plants are a bit spindly given the low light, but I don't really mind. The pothos has been stressed a couple of times and dropped some leaves along one of the vines. I might cut that one and replace it with some of the others falling to the floor. The light-colored fern (I don't know the species) basically didn't grow at all for the first year, but all at once decided to start growing, and I really like how it looks. There's definitely still room on the wall for additional planters. For the inner planters, I was worried a bit that PLA wouldn't hold up to the moisture, but it's been a complete non-issue. Two years of moist soil, and being removed and replaced multiple times as I switched out plants, and they are still super sturdy, not brittle at all.

Wall plants as of September 2023