What Is Plantscaping?

Plantscaping refers to interior landscaping. It’s all about using plants to add life and colour to interior spaces. Interior plantscaping companies may hang plants on walls and ceilings, grow them on trellises and other vertical structures, or plant them in plant pots, raised beds or garden boxes.

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How Is Plantscaping Different From Landscaping?

Plantscaping and landscaping have the same purpose: use the power of greenery, thoughtfully and deliberately, to beautify and enhance spaces. However, they have distinct applications.

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What is landscaping? It’s greening and improving outdoor spaces and working on the building exterior. Meanwhile, plantscaping is focused on the building interior; plantscaping is about creating and designing indoor spaces.

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That said, the line differentiating plantscaping from landscaping (and vice versa) has become increasingly blurred in practice. Nowadays, most people use the term ‘landscaping’ to refer to creating, designing and enhancing both indoor and outdoor spaces.

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The Benefits of Plantscaping

Why would a hotel allocate premium indoor real estate to plantscapes? Why would restaurants, hospitals, apartment buildings, and skyscrapers do the same? It is because plantscaping brings several benefits, including the following:

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• Captivating: Plantscapes beautify and add visual interest and a focal point to indoor spaces. Imagine walking into an office building lobby and seeing a moss wall behind the receptionist counter. That would most certainly capture your attention. A moss wall is lovely and visually interesting; more importantly, it naturally attracts the gaze and directs visitors to the reception desk.
• Bigger, deeper and taller: Plants and other indoor landscaping features can make smaller spaces look bigger, deeper and taller. It’s all in what plants you choose and how you arrange them. Putting plants in the corners of a small space will draw the eyes to those corners and give the illusion of more space. Hanging plants from the ceilings or using climbers and creepers or tall and slender plants can draw the eyes up and make a room seem taller. Letting plants peek through glass walls or partly through the corners of hidden nooks and half-walls or using plants of different heights all across the room can draw the eyes deeper into a space and, thus, add depth to a room.
• Warmer and cosier: Plants of different types and heights, grouped together to mark smaller areas in a vast, cavernous hall, will divide the big space into cosy pocket gardens that look and feel more inviting, welcoming and relaxing than a sea of uninterrupted carpeting.
• Quieter: Plants absorb noise. Use a strategic mixture of plants to help soften the sounds in open-plan offices, giving employees a quieter space to work and think. A luxury hotel can utilise plants to give their lobby and hallways a hushed atmosphere that matches its upscale branding.
• Cleaner: It’s no secret that plants consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. They also remove toxins and pollutants from the air. For these reasons, plants indoors make for cleaner, oxygen-rich air.
• Happier and more relaxed: Plants c0an make us feel happier, lower our blood pressure and lessen our stress. They make excellent additions to hospitals and offices. Hotels can also use plantscapes to improve their guests’ moods.
• More productive: Live plants indoors can lead to cleaner air and a quieter atmosphere and improve the mood of the room occupants. For these reasons, plants lead to greater productivity in workplaces.
• More functional: Plantscaping can accomplish a specific architectural purpose or emphasise the design of the space. You can use large indoor plants to mark out cosy seating coves in a hotel’s immense lobby or install a floor-to-ceiling green wall to screen off the pantry from the rest of the office floor.

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Plantscaping Techniques and Strategies

Plantscaping is not as simple as bringing potted plants indoors. It requires the strategic selection and placement of plants, accessories and other interior landscaping features. It is having and following a big picture (i.e., a vision and a plan) instead of adding plants according to one’s mood and plant availability.

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Picking the plant varieties to use in interior landscaping projects is a crucial task. For instance, if you want noise reduction, consider broadleaf plants. You also need to develop the most effective plant mixture and placement. A green wall near a staircase and plants suspended along hallways can help absorb vibrations.

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Strategising also involves picking and arranging plants and placing them so they will help accomplish your vision for the space. For high, expansive spaces, you may need larger-than-usual vegetation to create immersive focal points.

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There’s also the matter of arrangement. For greater visual interest, use plants of different heights and arrange them to provide visual complexity and interest. Use lines, curves and focal points.

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You must also consider your choice of plants based on their life cycles. Perhaps you want a colourful flower wall every January. In that case, look for flowering shrubs and trees that yield flowers every January. Meanwhile, if you like flowers year-round, change your plant mixture so the flowers in your plantscape bloom at different times of the year.

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You should also plan for maintenance. An impressive wall of moss will be useless if you can’t keep it looking healthy, green and trim.

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Ready for Plantscaping?

There are many things to consider when plantscaping. Before you start an indoor plantscaping project, talk to interior plantscaping companies for expert insight and assistance.

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Planters UAE is the largest full-service landscaping company in the Gulf region, with over 40 years of experience in landscaping.

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Talk to us about your commercial plantscaping project today!