Serioulsy, don't get too excited. It's nothing like the SF MoMa vertical garden. Just inspired by it.

Here's the deal: We had a big wall that needed some love. "What about a green wall, we thought". So, a green wall it became. Here's the story.

This is the original wall in the back courtyard

WE ADDED 7.5 FEET TO THIS ROOM so the wall got longer.

This is the master bedroom suite. We enlarged it, not only to house a walk-in closet and full master bath but also to change the window configuration so it looked out on the back canyon.

AND NOW WE WERE STARING AT A BIG, LONG WALL.

We taped off the section of the wall that we wanted the green wall to occupy.

BUT, WHAT'S IT GONNA LOOK LIKE?

This is my new favorite thing to do. I call this my 'novice render'. I just worked in Photoshop, extending the current wall (with future wall color). Then I found a photo of a vertical garden and pasted it into place.

This allowed us to look at the scale and see if we wanted to increase or decrease it.

THE INSPIRATION

I spent a lot of time looking at vertical gardens looking at the type of plants, including texture and color. Most of the vertical gardens I found were interior. Since ours was exterior, I needed to find plants that could withstand the winter freeze (it can get seriously cold in San Jose!).

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This is the contractors finishing the wall and preparing the space.

Here's what we used

Lance did a TON of research to find vertical planter pockets that were affordable. There are a gazillion options. One of the options is the have pockets to house 4" or 1 gallon plants. We read that the smaller plants (4") had a more instant impact and were simple to plant. We got two sheets with 64 pockets total. Here's what we purchased.

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BUT HOW DO THEY GET WATER?

Lance installed drip lines between each of the pockets. These connected to the rest of the water system.

OUR FINAL PLANT CHOICES

I'll be honest here. I ended up getting these plants days before I needed to get it planted. We were in major deadline mode with the open house one week away. I needed to find plants that had good texture, would not get too large and could weather the exterior temperature. I also needed to find plants that were either available at the wholesale nursery NOW. Or could be ordered within 2 days. The people at Capitol Wholesale Nursery came to my rescue.

These are the 6 plants I finally decided on

If you look really closely, you can see the names of the plants (or reach out to me!). The last photo is mondo grass. If I could do this all over again, I would find more species of ferns. The ferns had the most amazing textures and colors. Plus, there coverage was great. Normally you can't have ferns outside. But since, we had a 4 foot overhang, it protected them for the harshest of elements.