Floating Gardens: decorate outdoors and indoors by creating a sky planter

Hanging branches, floating leaves, rootless plants and vases to decorate ceilings, verandas and windows: a sky planter is a technique that unleashes your decorative imagination and allows you to create floating gardens, filling spaces with greenery.

Designing a green area of this kind offers great satisfaction: a floating garden can be perfect as a winter garden.

Let's see how to design an aerial green space where you can look up and find yourself immersed in flowers and nature...both inside and outside your home or work environment.

Sky Planter: a practical guide

To install a floating garden that is both decorative and practical, you need to take some steps to make sure the plants get the right amount of light, they can be watered properly and installed taking into account the space's design and look. Here are some practical tips: 

• Choose an environment whose structure allows you to hang the cables that the containers and plants will hang from. The best areas are those with beams or rooms where you can add supports, like nails in the wall or other systems to hang the vases from.
• It's also a good idea to consider the type of container – vase, basket, ampoule or other creative solutions that we'll see shortly – that you want to use for your floating garden. Depending on the structure you can then assess how to hang the container in the area chosen for the sky planter.
• Now it's time to choose the plants. You can use your imagination and select from a wide variety of plants: flowers, green, succulent.
• Once you've chosen the plants to include in your floating garden, you can hang them at different heights to create a multiform aerial surface that conveys an idea of movement.
• The last step is to understand how to water and clean your installation. In fact, constant maintenance will be necessary, both to water the plants and to clean the area of foliage, twigs and soil.

Decorating a floating garden: green ideas and tips

Now that you've seen how to design a sky planter, you can let yourself be inspired by original and refined green options for a floating garden you can enjoy outdoors. In fact, this technique works well with a flowery pergola where a floating garden can sway with the help of horizontal supports.

Glass ampoules and lighting effects

These glass vases are reminiscent of an alchemist's ampoule, a soap bubble, a glass of fine wine: spherical containers that can be used for small bulbs or funny succulent plants. Quite visually appealing, this solution plays with light and is therefore particularly suitable for spaces with windows or glazing.

Rootless plants: practical and fascinating

Have you seen a tillandsia? They're plants from the central states of America and have the particular characteristic of not having any roots. Tillandsia draws its nourishment from the air, water and the surrounding environment, requiring minimal maintenance. Green elements of great value, these plants can be placed on any hanging support and are therefore perfect to create an original and almost completely self-sufficient sky planter.

Natural spheres: coconut fibre becomes a vase

Thanks to a special green technique it's possible to create potting soil bulbs wrapped in coconut fibre. The plants thus emerge from a sphere with a very natural and refined appearance, and when they are hung they are transformed into an exotic and unconventional floating garden.

In addition to these suggestions, it's possible to create a floating garden using many types of pottery designed specifically to be hung from the ceiling, which can also be complemented by a specific lighting system to create a suggestive interplay of light and shadows.

If you like the idea of a sky planter you might want to consider one to decorate your indoor and outdoor spaces, making them more pleasant and welcoming, also thanks to the contact with nature in unexpected settings. This is why these refined solutions are perfect when combined with a Corradi outdoor design, where the clean lines and harmony between the environment and the people who live there allow creating unique emotions and atmospheres.