DIY Pothos Green Wall: How I Built a 120-Plant Living Wall / re

I built this DIY pothos green wall using 120 individual Golden Pothos plants and a simple wire-grid structure in our office in Korea.

It actually started much smaller, with just 24 pots. After seeing how well the first section worked, I expanded the installation across the entire office partition by adding 96 more plants.

This isn't a theoretical green-wall design. The photos below document the actual installation, how I hid the nursery pots, what the wall looked like after one and two weeks, and how I handled one of the biggest practical problems with a wall this size: watering 120 plants without soaking the office floor.

1. It Started With Just 24 Pothos Plants

Before building the full wall, I started with a much smaller section.

I attached 24 individual Golden Pothos pots to a wire-grid structure in the office. It was a relatively simple setup, but once the plants were arranged together, I liked the effect of the foliage covering the otherwise plain partition.

The first 24 plants also gave me a chance to see how the idea would look before expanding it.

Instead of replacing the original setup with a professional green-wall system, I decided to continue using the same basic approach and simply make it much larger.

2. Preparing Nearly 100 More Pothos Plants

To fill the rest of the partition, I needed another 96 pothos plants.

Before working on them, I covered the office floor with newspaper and prepared the plants and potting materials together.

Working with almost 100 plants at once looks overwhelming in a photograph, but doing the same task repeatedly made the process relatively straightforward.

This was also one of the advantages of building the wall from individual pots.

Each plant remained in its own container rather than being planted into one large integrated green-wall system. That made it possible to handle and reposition the plants individually during installation.

3. Expanding the Wall From 24 to 120 Pots

I installed the additional pots across the wire grid until the previously empty sections of the partition were filled.

With the original 24 plants plus the 96 new plants, the finished installation contained:

4. The Red Nursery Pots Were More Noticeable Than I Expected

This was one of the practical details I hadn't fully appreciated until the wall was assembled.

The pothos looked good, but the red nursery pots were clearly visible between the leaves.

That interrupted the continuous green appearance I wanted.

Rather than changing all 120 containers, I adjusted the position and orientation of the individual plants so the foliage naturally covered the pots.

The goal was simple:

When looking at the wall from the front, I wanted to see leaves, not containers.

After repositioning the plants, the red pots became much less noticeable.

This relatively small adjustment made a surprisingly large visual difference.

5. What the Green Wall Looked Like One Week Later

I also wanted to see whether the wall would continue looking artificial and newly assembled or whether the plants would begin to settle into the space.

After about one week, the foliage had started to change position.

The leaves appeared more upright and the wall looked less like 120 plants that had just been placed together.

This was one reason I didn't judge the finished result immediately after installation.

Plants move and reorient their leaves after being repositioned, so the appearance of a newly installed plant wall can continue changing after the physical work is finished.

6. Two Weeks Later, the Individual Pots Were Harder to See

By approximately two weeks after installation, the difference was even more noticeable.

The foliage from neighboring pots overlapped more naturally, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish one pot from another when looking at the wall as a whole.

This was much closer to what I had originally imagined.

Instead of:

120 pots attached to a partition

it visually began to read as:

one large surface of pothos foliage.

For me, that transition was one of the most interesting parts of the project.

The installation itself created the structure, but the plants gradually created the finished appeara

7. The Hard Part: Watering 120 Individual Pots Indoors

Building the wall was only the beginning.

A green wall containing 120 individual pots also means 120 plants that need to be watered and maintained.

And because this installation was indoors, excess water running onto the office floor was something I needed to avoid.

My practical solution was simple.

When watering, I positioned the pots upright and placed thick layers of newspaper underneath the plants.

The newspaper absorbed the excess drainage water instead of allowing it to spread across the floor.

After watering the entire wall, the newspaper could become completely soaked, which showed just how much drainage had to be managed.

It wasn't an elegant automated irrigation system.

But for this DIY setup, it was a straightforward way to deal with a very real maintenance problem.

And that experience taught me something important about indoor green walls:

Installing the plants is only half the project. You also need to design for watering and maintenance.

What I Learned From Building a 120-Plant Pothos Wall

ooking back at the process, the biggest lesson wasn't simply that Golden Pothos can cover a wall.

It was that a DIY living wall needs to work as a maintenance system, not just as decoration.

Using individual pots gave me flexibility. I could reposition plants, hide containers behind foliage, and work with each plant separately.

But increasing the wall from 24 to 120 pots also multiplied the amount of routine maintenance.

If I were planning another large indoor plant wall, I would think about the watering method at the same time as the visual design, rather than treating watering as something to solve after installation.

That is probably the most practical lesson I took away from this project.