Gardening with Wilson

After looking at the DIY ideas in the Home Office, the visitor can walk through the ‘slanted door’ into the living room. The living room is the place at home where one entertains our guests and often people display plants in nice containers in an attempt to beautify the space.

Note that the living room can be a little dark to grow many plants. Remember to bring your display plants to a brighter place such as just before a sunny/bright windowsill or balcony to recuperate after a week or two worth of display inside the living room!

One unique plant display item designed by my landscape architect, Ms Abby Ng, was a series of wall-mounted containers that seem to ‘grow’ out of the wall as they ‘fall’ from the top of the wall to the floor. Each container has a shiny, metallic finish.

We have another vertical garden system on display in the living room. This unique vertical garden system is called the ‘Grass Mirror’ which is a product carried by a local company, Imaginative Growth. It is designed by a group of French architects, H2O Architects. The Grass Mirror is not made out of glass mirrors but out of polished stainless steel. Each planter is stacked one on another to make a larger reflective living wall.

Another very interesting product from Imaginative Growth on display were a series of upside-down plant pots, called the Boskke Sky Planter. Designed by Patrick Morris, these pots house plants that see to defy gravity and make conversation pieces among our visitors who come to our Living Room. Unlike conventional pots that sit on the floor, these pots allow one to grow plants without sacrificing floor space! Get one of these pots and you can figure out how watering is done as well as how you can pot that plant inside each Boskke Sky Planter.

The next display idea is a terrarium coffee table. Not something you can easily fashion easily by yourself, you probably need to engage a competent carpenter to make this coffee table terrarium! An idea inspired by existing coffee table aquariums, this terrarium allows the plant-lover to grow his plants nicely in the living room. There are fluorescent light tubes installed inside this coffee table so that a range of low-light houseplants can be grown. The glass top can be lifted and give access to one to maintain and water the plants. There is a small gap left between the coffee table base and the glass top and that allows excess heat given off by the lights to escape (hot air rises!).

Here’s another DIY plant display idea that is probably much easier to construct but may be a little difficult to replicate due to the rather unique glass container. When powered up, the lamp in the center has colours that transit from one colour to another and we though the plants planted in this garden would dance like they were in the disco! The lamp stand and circuitry were taken from a store-bought lamp and installed onto a styrofoam base.

The same concept was extended to make a tabletop lamp terrarium. The terrarium this time was a closed one. The base of this set-up is a clear glass container which originally came with a lid. To fix a lamp on top of it, my team members fashioned a base that fits nicely on top of the glass container using circular sheets of styrofoam. The lamp and its necessary circuitry were taken from a store-bought lamp that came with a lampshade.

Because such a terrarium lamp is not always lit in a typical home situation, you may want to grow the plant inside a pot which can be put in and brought out of the glass container base easily. This allows you to give the plant its vital dose of sunlight so as to keep it healthy rather than allowing it to languish inside the darkness when the lamp is not turned on.