Unfortunately a lot of people have a fear of nature, and as a living wall installer we sometimes get asked by hesitant clients if living walls attract bugs. The short answer is no. Living walls do not attract bugs.
However, a living wall is, well, alive and it does come with its own life forms. It is an ecosystem that when done correctly has thriving plants. Thriving plants mean healthy roots, and healthy roots mean a lot more than growing media and water. Healthy roots have all sorts of microbes and beneficial bacteria. Literally millions of them. They aren’t all visible to the human eye but they’re there.
Where there are microbes and bacteria there can also be creatures that feed on them. Little bugs, worms, nematodes and countless other tiny creatures that make the ecosystem healthy and robust. These creatures, although invisible unless you dig deep into the roots of the plants and look very closely, are essential to a healthy living wall.
Before you recoil in horror at the thought of all these creatures invading your home, it is important to understand that the space around a living wall – walls, floor, ceiling – are lifeless dead zones where these microscopic creatures wouldn’t last more than a couple minutes. There is not a chance in hell they are leaving the comfort of their rooted homes. They stay in the living wall where they are happy and where they perform crucial roles in the healthy ecosystem of a vibrant living wall.
In a living wall the food chain stops at these tiny, almost invisible, residents. If these plants were in the tropical forest like their distant cousins then the food chain would be much larger. The tiny creatures would be food for larger creatures: tiny frogs and lizards. They would in turn be food for larger animals and so on.
And if we are lucky, once in a very rare while we do find teeny tiny frogs and lizards in the plants we order.
Indoor living wall plants almost all come from Florida. We ship them up by truck or plane in climate controlled environments that mimic the tropical world they grew up in. And sometimes a hapless frog or lizard will get caught up in the move.
Not all clients see them as welcome guests, in which case we take them away, but we suggest leaving them in the wall. They probably will stay in the wall and you’ll never see them again. Or they might go exploring and be found terrified and half dead in some corner of the room. Sadly their chances of survival are bleak in their new world if they leave the wall.
We have a little frog right now we found hopping along the floor after installing a living wall. We keep him in a little terrarium and feed him fish food. We’re not sure how happy he is but he seems healthy. A couple months ago we found a little lizard, cute as hell, unfortunately he escaped and we doubt he lasted very long in his new environment.
One last thing we have encountered twice in our ten years of installing living walls: gnats. They are tiny little flies, barely visible to the eye, a little smaller than fruit flies. They are part of the ecosystem of soil. We got rid of them in a couple days by installing sticky paper near the wall. Not a huge nuisance but people get weirded out by that sort of thing.
We see it all as part of an ecosystem that is beautiful and vibrant.