How are you hanging? The dangly plants blog

Space is a premium in most homes so if we fill every surface with plants that us planties what to to create our indoor jungle, we will have no tables or floors left for living and very unhappy families.

We have shown you how shelves on a wall could hold lots of smaller plants and there is now a trend for living walls, which is not an easy thing to pull off. However, we can easily exploit so much empty space with hanging plants on wires, positioned at eye level to display them at their best vantage, or above, simulating a forest canopy with dappled light from a roof window. We hope to take you through our project next spring to do just that in our summer room taking advantage of sunlight flooding through large Velux roof windows. But for now, in winter, let us look at what we can do in any room. Before we look at the plants, a quick health & safety tip. Use strong wire, at least PVC coated 2mm stainless steel wire which you can buy online (like this one from Amazon.co.uk) with a kit like this one:

These kits have caribiners, turnbuckles to tighten the tension, aluminium sleeves (you can hammer to grip the wires) and single chucks to secure it as well. Figure 1. will allow you to take a weight up to 4kg, and Figure 2. 10kg. Figure 3 shows you how to use the caribiner and turnbuckle to secure it to a wall (appropriate wall plug needed ofcourse).

Once you have worked out how to do the above, go wild and create your wire trapeze!

In the earlier blog on displays, we used 2 Ikea shelves - secured to the wall with screws and about 7 feet apart.

The wire is then suspended between 2 shelves using the Figure 2. method above. A support wire is added midway as shown to the left, to allow adjusting of the tension using the turnbuckle as required.

So now you have a wire, what can you suspend from these?

Basically any plant and don't just limit yourself to the obvious dangly ones.

For example, we found this lovely gold-framed plant holder in Primark below and this was perfect for a succulent Pachyphytum oviferum, also called Moonstones - this one is blue-green, but they can come in pink, peach and lavender too (and produce delicate orange/pink/red bell-shaped blooms on stalks).

Not just from wires, in the backdrop you may have noticed a vine-like plant draping from a small trough on the shelf. This is a String of Turtles (Peperomia prostrata), a small succulent with turtle shell-like leaves. This is an easy care plant which hardly needs watering.

Back to the plants hanging on the wire, I have the nepenthes (pitcher plant from previous blog), the string of pearls (moved away from cold window over winter), and a recent acquisition, a Peperomia Hope, which is cross hybrid cultivar between Peperomia deppeana and Peperomia quadrifolia. Do refer to previous blog on Peperomia on care.

There are so many other possibilities for hanging plants that I will cover some in future blogs. I just wanted to mention 2 more that will join our trapeze artists. The resilient Devil's Ivy (Epipremnum aureum ) featured in a previous blog and its cousin Satin Porthos (Scindapsus pictus) below. Mine is too small but it is beginning to grow vines and will be perfect for the wire soon.

So do exploit the space above you and create your very own jungle palace!

Till next time, I leave you with this dilemma we all face every winter. Have a great week! 👦🏻💜🌵