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Landscape architect Josh Rosen, also known as Airplantman, got in touch with us recently and we immediately fell head over heels in love with his work with tillandsia air plants. His handmade Airplantframes are a refreshing and minimalist way to exhibit tillandsias anywhere. We offer them here in the store and in our Web Shop.

ABOVE:  Because tillandsia air plants don’t need soil, a vertical garden incorporating them is lightweight, transparent, and clean. Several frames can be combined to create a larger piece.

ABOVE: The variety of textures, colors, and forms of tillandsia air plants allows  them to be used the way a painter does paint. The frame allows them to be rearranged at will. Airplantframes bring out everyone’s inner “air plant artist.”

ABOVE: The white AirplantFrame vertical garden by Airplantman Designs brings a clean and fresh look, perfect for a kitchen or bathroom. The stunning tillandsia stricta shown here are one of the several blooming specials that can be regularly added to your AirplantFrame with the changing seasons. Photography by Airplantman.

ABOVE: A clean and senuous piece of living art that is easy to hang, AirplantFrame’s vertical garden brings nature into every room of the home. This AirlpantFrame features fragrant tillandsia crocata with its beautiful orange blooms and intoxicating scent. The blue flowesr of tillandsia neglecta contrast vividly against the bright orange of the AirplantFrame. Photography by Airplantman.

The frames come in three colors – matte white, matte black, and glossy orange. The powder-coated aluminum frames and stainless steel cables are completely rust-proof, lasting for a lifetime of creating compositions.

The frames weigh a mere 1.5 lbs and are constructed from powder-coated aluminum,with nylon-coated stainless steel cable forming a grid within. They are easy to hang indoors and outdoors. A notch centered on each side allows you to hang them horizontally or vertically – even in front of a window. The frames are easy to remove from their mounting place when you want to water, groom, and rearrange your tillandsias.

Purchase them here at the store or at our Web Shop.

We just love vertical gardens, and judging by all the response we get to the ones here in the store, so do you! Many people want to grow a vertical garden indoors. There are several easy ways to set up an indoor vertical garden: Woolly Pockets, Thigmotrope Satellite (available both in-store and in our Web Shop), and vertical tray gardens (available in-store only).

Photo by Caitlin Atkinson

ABOVE: A “Wally One” Woolly Pocket planted with lavish tropical plants complements this simple scene.

Photo by Caitlin Atkinson

Here you can see the ingredients for the upper garden before installation: a “Wally One” Woolly Pocket and philodendrons, begonia, bromeliad, and wire vine. You can see the corner eyelets used for mounting the pocket on the wall. Read more about Woolly Pocket gardens.

Thigmotrope Satellite is a beautiful tool that you can use to create your own vertical garden using tillandsia air plants. We invented it! See a simple vertical garden Flora designed with it below.

Use a fleet of Thigmotrope Satellites to implement your own vertical garden design in hard-to-reach places: that bright wall in the living room, under a skylight, or next to the kitchen window. Add tillandsia air plants, place in bright natural light; you can easily remove the plants to water them periodically or rearrange them. Thigmotrope Satellites couldn’t be easier to mount – wherever a screw goes.

Our own invention, it was designed by Seth Boor in collaboration with Flora Grubb. It is made in the San Francisco Bay Area and available only here at Flora Grubb Gardens and in our Web Shop. Read more about Thigmotrope Satellite.

At Sightglass Coffee in San Francisco’s South of Market District we used our own invention, the Thigmotrope Satellite, to design a vertical garden of tillandsia air plants. You’re sure in for a treat if you have not yet visited this amazing space (built by my honey, Kevin Smith, and the founders, Jerad & Justin) where they serve roasted-to-order coffees. Here’s a glimpse of the vertical garden in their entry.

ABOVE: That’s Seth Boor at left, architect of our San Francisco nursery and co-inventor of the Thigmotrope Satellite. He and I had fun together designing the placement and array of tillandsia air plants at Sightglass.

How cute are these hanging Grape Wood Tillandsia Gardens? They’re so simple – just tillandsia air plants and gnarled wood from old vineyard stock. Give them a bright spot indoors and mist them with water every couple of weeks.

ABOVE: Add a touch of nature to your walls with the Grape Wood Tillandsia Garden. It’s the easiest way to add a vertical garden.

ABOVE: We offer them in our Web Shop as well as here in the store. Learn more about tillandsia air plants. 

Woolly Pockets are an amazingly versatile way to create a vertical garden wherever plants can get the light they need. Look at how many varieties of garden beauty you can create with them below – indoors, outdoors, jungly, framed-and-formal, expansive, or neat and singular. They allow almost any kind of plant to thrive in them. We stock them in our store in San Francisco and offer the “Wally One” in our Web Shop.

Thigmotrope Satellite is a beautiful tool that you can use to create your own vertical garden using tillandsia air plants. Thigmotrope Satellite is a vehicle for cultivating nature in otherwise impossible-to-reach places: that smooth wall in the living room, the little area next to the bathtub, or just above the kitchen sink.

Thigmotrope Satellite is simple to install and makes caring for tillandsia air plants equally easy. It screws directly into a mounting surface such as painted drywall or a wood plaque. If you pre-drill, you can even screw it into a concrete or masonry surface. Its three prongs gently cradle your air plants, allowing for effortless placement and removal for watering and rearrangement.

We’re got Thigmotrope Satellites here in our San Francisco store, and also in our Web Shop. We also have an enormous collection of tillandsia air plants to create your own unique garden with.

Composed of solid welded steel, it’s made right here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So what’s with the name Thigmotrope? “Thigmotropism” refers to the instinct of certain organisms to turn toward touch, as for instance the roots of an air plant embrace the bark of a tree, or a vine wraps its tendrils around a twig.

Putting a frame around a vertical garden makes it a pretty picture. It also makes a vertical garden feasible in a smaller, urban setting. Squaring with materials like driftwood, salvaged lumber, concrete, or steel gives the wildness within a bounded, solid feeling.

Woolly Pockets allow for all kinds of plants to be grown in a vertical garden, and these well-aerated felt containers (made from recycled plastic bottles!) can easily be mounted inside a frame. It’s the easiest way we know to green up a wall quickly and stylishly.

Check out the beautiful interior vertical garden mounted in a recessed concrete surface below. Thriving in this indoor garden are bird’s nest fern (Asplenium nidus), stripe-y prayer plant (Maranta sp.), spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum ‘Variegatum’), and palmy cardboard zamia (Z. furfuracea).

ABOVE: Designed by our own Daniel Nolan for Maven, a gourmet tavern in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco, the three framed Woolly Pockets gardens preside over the bar.

ABOVE: In the place of a much-photographed succulent panel garden, our friend Lisa Lee Benjamin worked with Jim Kumiega, our display manager here at the nursery, to create this outdoor framed Woolly Pocket garden in her tiny courtyard, above. I just love the way the exuberant foliage pushes past the boundaries of the frame yet the plants remain firmly rooted within it. In gardens as in art, the addition of a frame completes the beauty of the picture.

Our friends Matti & Megan lived by the sea, where they used to go walking with their dog, Max, and pick up beautiful pieces of driftwood that they made into these beautiful mounts for staghorn ferns (Platycerium bifurcatum). Matti and Megan are full of good ideas. If you haven’t read their award-winning blog, Far Out Flora, you’re in for quite a treat. Now they live in Wisconsin with their new baby, Zoe.

This is a photo of our first ever Woolly Pocket garden, installed in 2010. We were so excited to be among the first stores to carry Woolly Pockets and offer the “Wally One” in our Web Shop. Since then, we’ve put vertical gardens in all kinds of places, but this was our first.

Here is the same garden a few months later, all filled-in. The pockets have disappeared behind the plants, and the vertical garden is thriving.

We created this vertical garden for the entrance of Shotwell in downtown San Francisco. Want to create a garden like this for yourself? Come in to the store and we’ll help you design a vertical garden of your own.

Photo by Lance Shows

Photo by Lance Shows