How much does a Living Wall cost in 2021?
Whilst you’ve probably read about the pitfalls of living walls and the tremendous expense associated with them – living wall maintenance, irrigation, plant replacement – this really only applies to large commercial project.
In reality, a DIY living wall project can cost as little as £100.
We will breakdown all the costs in detail below, but you can setup a back garden green wall with:
- Some cheap sedum plants
- Growing medium
- A DIY planter (a pallet, planting bags or vertical garden trays)
- Fixing materials
For very little. Both in terms of setup costs and ongoing maintenance.
How much does a Living Wall cost per square meter in the UK?
A Green Wall Kit
- Kits are the most convenient at-home living wall option
- Small living wall kits should come in around £50, but they won't cover an entire meter squared
- Larger kits can cover an entire wall, but will cost 10 times this amount (and more!)
- Living wall kits don't tend to include irrigation systems
DIY Living Wall Project
- Cheap DIY projects start from around £70/m2
- This only accounts for the cheapest vertical planting solution. So there are no flowering perennials or an irrigation system
- If you wanted to use more expensive flowers, an irrigation system and a more premium planting solution (like a living trough) then it would cost somewhere between £200 - 300
- Of course, the larger the project, the cheaper it becomes per square meter
Ultimately economies of scale come into play too.
If you only create a 1m2 living wall – that includes an irrigation system and a premium planting solution – then it’s going to be very expensive per meters squared.
Larger walls will cost less (per m2) because you only need one irrigation system or water tank for the whole project.
Living Wall Costs - The Breakdown
Green Wall Kits cost per meter squared
Material | Budget Price (per m2) | Premium Price (per m2) |
|---|---|---|
Living wall kit | £120 | £200 |
Plants | £30 | £150 |
Growing Medium | £10 | £25 |
Irrigation System | £50 | £500+ |
Ultimately living wall kits are a single purchase solution that include everything you need for an at home living wall.
Within the kit you will get:
- Planters
- Water filters
- Fence materials
- Raw plugs
- Screws
Almost everything but the plants, growing medium and – if required – an irrigation system.
Typically you will spend somewhere between £150 – 250 per square meter on a living wall using a kit. An irrigation system can cost significantly more, but ultimately the larger the wall the lower the cost per m2.
DIY Living Wall Cost per meter squared
Material | Budget Price (per m2) | Premium Price (per m2) |
|---|---|---|
Planters or a planting medium | £15 | £100 |
Plants | £30 | £150 |
Growing Medium | £10 | £25 |
Irrigation System | £50 | £500+ |
Fixing materials | £10 | £25 |
Water filters | £10 | £20 |
The DIY route is significantly cheaper. Don’t ever be put off from turning a wall into something beautiful based on the cost.
Irrigation systems are – more often than not – unnecessary for DIY living wall projects.
As that’s the case you could build a small DIY project for under £100. Plants – like sedums, ferns or succulents – are hardy and need very little in terms of maintenance of replacing.
Individual Living Wall Element Cost
1. Planters or planting mediums – like cheap planting bags that cost as little as £15 to vertical garden planters or modular trays that can cost £100s – are a simple to setup, scalable solution.
2. Plants really do vary in cost. Sedums and low maintenance, evergreen plants like some species of fern are cheap and hardy. Whereas some tropical plants only thrive indoors and can really push the cost up.
3. Fixing materials – you really shouldn’t be paying much at all for some screws.
4. Growing medium – Ditto for compost.
5. Irrigation – a cheap, workable irrigation system for a mid-sized back-garden or in-home living wall shouldn’t cost you more than £150.
6. Water filters – generally cheap and not always required. Whether you need water filters or not depends on the type of plant. Native UK plants, or hardier species generally thrive everywhere. Some tropical plants may have more specific requirements.
Additional DIY Living Wall Costs
Living Wall Installation Cost
Well the good news is DIY living wall projects are free to install.
The bad news is you have to do it yourself.
That is as long as you’re willing to do it yourself. If you do it yourself it will cost you time – typically less than a day – so it depends how much you value that.
If you’d rather forego the DIY project in favour of some well-earnt me-time, then you can expect to pay no more than £200 installation. Unless of course there’s a particularly tricky piece of irrigation work to setup or the wall in question is large.
Living Wall Maintenance Cost
Again if you do everything yourself the only things you’d need to account for are:
- Watering
- Weeding
- Repotting / replanting – typically up to 5% of plants die every year in green wall projects
- Damage
An irrigation system can have a total cost of a couple of hundred pounds per year for a mid-sized living wall.
But replanting, weeding and watering – outside of irrigating – should cost you very little. We estimate an average of £10 / month.
Living Wall Replanting Cost
To break down the replanting cost of living walls, this is a pretty standard estimation:
- If you have 100 plants on your green wall
- Somewhere between 1 – 5% will die each year
- So you’d need to purchase up to 5 plants
- If the average cost of each plant is £4
- Then your repotting cost would be £20 / year
How much will a Living Wall save you?
- Living walls act as a thermal screen that mitigates heat loss
- And - in large enough cases - reduce the urban heat island effect
- Certain studies have seen a 34% summertime energy saving through the use of a living wall
Well, the likelihood of your DIY project saving you a significant sum is pretty low – unless you cover an entire, significant, wall on the outside of your home rather than your shed or garden.
Really the main savings come with large-scale commercial projects. But they cost the metaphorical arm and leg.
But ultimately green walls have some really impressive energy saving benefits:
So whilst living large-scale living walls can significantly reduce air heating and cooling bills – if you’re looking for a cost-effective way to save money on your energy bills that you can manage yourself, you’d be better off with a green roof.
Heat rises, remember. A living wall is a beautiful way to bring some lush greenery inside, grow your own food or cover a manky old wall.
