of the Singer Hill Café in Oregon City,
Ore., founder of website The Vertical Garden Institute.Yates says he learned through a lot of trial
and error, and also used the book The Vertical Garden by
Patrick Blanc, a botanist considered the inventor of vertical gardens, as a guide.

Start by choosing a wall. “If you’ve got a wall that’s ugly, that’s the one you’re going to want to do,” Yates says. The good news is that almost any wall will do, and unless you want to build a very large vertical garden or plant trees, you don’t need to worry about weight load.