Vertical Gardening: Grow Up, Not Out, for More Vegetables and Flowers in Much Less Space

Save space, time, and effort while letting your garden reach new heights of beauty and bounty with this definitive guide to growing perennials, shrubs, vegetables, fruits, and annuals—vertically.

One of the biggest mistakes gardeners make each season is starting out too big and then quickly realizing their large plot requires too much weeding, watering, and backbreaking labor. Vertical gardening is easier—and guarantees a better outcome. Plants in a vertical garden grow, climb, and twine upward to create a striking landscape that saves space, requires little effort, produces high yields, and reduces pest and disease problems. Whether your goal is armloads of flowers, a plentiful vegetable garden, or a productive fruit harvest, you’ll discover how small patches of soil, bare walls, and simple trellises, arches, and supports can be transformed into grow-up or grow-down gardens with just a few inexpensive supplies.

Notable gardener Derek Fell has experimented with thousands of plant varieties, and in Vertical Gardening he recommends the best vegetables, fruits, and flowers for space-saving vertical gardens. He also shares common mutually beneficial ground-level plants and shows you how to easily combine different types of plants to create a lush curtain of flowers, foliage, and vines.

With a mix of DIY and commercially available string supports, trellises, pergolas, raised beds, skyscraper gardens, and topsy-turvy planters, the vertical garden system reduces work, increases yields, makes harvesting easier, and can be practiced in spaces as small as a container or a one-by-four-foot strip. Featuring lush photographs of Fell’s own vertical methods, trellised plants, hanging plants, container gardens, and plant towers, Vertical Gardening shows how beautiful, productive, and rewarding a vertical garden can be.