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.