Trellis Design Ideas: How to Balance Beauty and Function in Your Garden

Beautiful Design Ideas with Trellises

Anyone can see that some of the value of a trellis is tied up in its visual aesthetic, and our trellises are truly unique. In our portfolio, there’s not just one for any personal taste, but a number that will suit nearly any setting.

Many of our freestanding garden trellises are designed to stand on their own and will add grace and elegance to your garden with or without the ornamentation of greenery. You can set up one of our iron garden trellises and leave it unaccented to make a more pointed expression, or add in some other elements of decor around it to soften the tone. You can also use them to train vertically oriented or vining plants, of which there are many that do splendidly on trellises.

In our collection of freestanding garden trellises, we offer two-dimensional designs as well as obelisk trellises that are more pronounced in character. Some of our obelisk trellises add a lot more fullness to a space, and give a lot more area for plants to grow on, should you choose to go that route.

You don’t need to accent a trellis with fruits, flowers, vegetables, or other greenery in order to profit from it, though. In fact, some of our trellises serve as the ideal canvas for other hanging ornamentation, or to set the scene for whatever theme you want to go with for the design of your grounds.

A Trellis for Wonderful Wall Decor

In addition to our freestanding garden trellises, we also offer a number of wonderful decorative wall trellises that are just as well suited to helping you add some refinement and class to your wall decor, whether inside or out.

As we said, whether you ornament your spaces indoors or outdoors with some of our wall trellises, you don’t need to lean on climbing plants to make a mark. You can decorate a wall trellis inside your home with paper decorations or fill it with cards that you have gathered from loved ones over the years. You can even make a display with a string of LEDs or rope lights that you can change through the seasons.

In fact, you can use the trellis as the backdrop for other seasonal decorations. Hang up cobwebs in October to herald the coming of Halloween, or accent it with a fall wreath in admiration of the changing seasons. Set it up with lights or other ornaments in the winter to celebrate the winter holidays. When it comes to decorating with a wall trellis, your imagination is your best friend. It is the only thing that binds you, and you can go any way you so desire.

It doesn’t need to be seasonal, either. You can use a wall trellis to help reinforce the theme of your interior decoration. Are you going with an industrial theme? Add some vintage bulbs to the trellis and you’ll have a mix between Art Nouveau and turn-of-the-century industrialism. Going with a rustic or bucolic theme instead? Add some weathered wood or antique ornaments to the trellis and you’ll be gold. The possibilities are basically endless.

Although, as we mentioned, you don’t need to add anything to a trellis for it to leave its mark on the setting.

Match the Theme

A trellis from our shop doesn’t need any help to improve the setting or complement the decor in your home. One of the greatest things you can do with one of our wall trellises is use it to accent the very design aesthetic you have created.

Pick out one of our wall trellises that matches the theme of your interior decor and you will be dazzled by the effect. A trellis like our Italian Iron Trellis wall art will add a bit of rustic Tuscan or Italian Renaissance flair to your home, without any help whatsoever from your other decoration. If you’ve already dreamt of decorating your own little villa, this is a step in the right direction.

Do you have an artistic urban or modern theme going on in your home? Then you might appreciate a trellis like our Diamond Wall Trellis or one of our other simplified geometric designs. Even without any other additions, trellises like these can make a setting pop. When you pair them up with a theme you’re already working with, the effects can be wonderful.

As we said, the possibilities are practically endless. Take a look through our collection featured above to get some ideas and see what other specific designs we can offer your home.

Trellises Are a Gardener’s Best Friend

Of course, it doesn’t have to be all about the trellis itself. Beautiful as they may be on their own, our trellises are wonderful tools to help gardeners achieve better crops and give their plants the support they need.

As our trellises are made to the highest standards of quality and from durable materials like iron, they will last for many seasons with proper care. It’s just a bonus that they add so much style.

In addition, trellises can help gardeners save space, grow plants more efficiently, and depending on what you grow, can not only increase the harvest itself but make it easier to gather the fruits of your labor. Growing climbers on a trellis can help reduce the risk of disease and damage from pests as well. Read on to learn some more about specific plants you can grow on a trellis.

Liven the Setting with Flowers

Some climbing flowering plants will adapt wonderfully to a trellis and, in fact, many will attempt to climb anything they can get their tendrils around. With flowers, too, you can enhance your setting. If you’re looking for a way to add a splash of color to your outdoor space that you can put front and center or incorporate into the scheme of your exterior design, a trellis will give you some freedom to accomplish that.

Some flowers are easy to care for and grow prolifically when afforded only a modest amount of care. Take a look at some of these flowers which will adapt well to a trellis.

• Morning Glories - These sun-loving plants will more than cover a trellis, even a tall one, within the few months that span the summer of northern climates. With the right nutrition and full sunlight, you can transform a trellis into a burst of color throughout the summer months. In addition, morning glories are prolific bloomers.

Once the plant reaches maturity, it will expand itself in weeks or even months of big, bright blooms. Another thing that’s great about morning glories, in addition to the fact that they are relatively easy to care for, is that you can find cultivars in almost any color you want.

• Sweet Peas - If you live in a cooler climate and can easily moderate the moisture content of your soil, then you might love sweet peas. They are relatively cold hardy — sometimes they even survive a frost — and they are also pretty tough plants. They won’t flourish in the heat like morning glories and they also won’t grow as fast, but they will offer your garden trellis something that you’ll miss with morning glories: amazingly sweet scents.
• Mandevilla - Mandevilla vines, which have beautiful, glossy foliage and even more beautiful blooms, can be grown indoors but will flourish outside in warm climates with bright temperatures and high humidity. Provide your Mandevilla with a trellis from our shop and it will blanket it in beautiful green leaves and bright colors in the summer.
• Honeysuckles - There are many different breeds of honeysuckles and most, if not all, of them are vining, climbing, prolific flowering plants. Their needs are more similar to morning glories than to sweet peas, and they will flourish in heat, humidity, and full sun. They will also ravenously cover whatever trellis you provide them. In addition, they will bloom profusely, like morning glories, but offer you the sweet, delightful scent for which honeysuckles are so well known.

Related reading: Best Climbing Plants for Trellises and How to Train Vining Plants on Your Trellis.

Grow Vegetables

The flowers mentioned above aren’t the only plants that grow vertically, and there are many fruits and vegetables that you can grow with the help of a trellis and that will appreciate the vertical architecture. You can even boost the production of some of these plants with the help of a trellis. Here are some popular vertically oriented crops:

• Beans - Considering how quickly and how prolifically beans grow and produce, you might think they’d be heavy feeders, but they’re not really. They do, however, love full sun and high temperatures, and they’ll scale anything you offer them. Plant some beans in late spring after threats of frost have passed and you’ll have a tower of beans by late summer.
• Peas - Unlike beans, peas prefer much cooler temperatures and will not drink as much as beans will. They also won’t grow as fast, but if you don’t provide them with a place to grow they will attempt to spread out along the ground and it will impact their progress. Give them a trellis, some indirect light, and cool temperatures and you’ll have peas. Remember, peas don’t just dislike the heat, it can actually kill them, so plant peas in early spring or late summer.
• Squash - Some squashes will grow very well up a trellis, and many of them love the heat of summer. They also take a lot of fertilizer, a ton of sun, and a lot of water, especially once they start to produce fruits. If you grow a variety up a trellis, make sure that you support any fruits that start to develop.
• Tomatoes - Tomatoes, unlike the other plants on this list, are not viners. They will, however, grow prolifically, especially with extra nitrogen, and they will need vertical support. Grow some tomatoes around the base of a trellis and tie them to the structure as they get taller, and you’ll have tomatoes all summer long.
• Cucumbers - If left to their own devices, cucumbers will run out along the ground, and they do just fine doing so. However, the fruits they produce will lay on the ground, so you’ll lose some of them to pests and rot. Laying on the ground will also discolor the fruit, and if you want to avoid this, give them a trellis to grow upwards along. Cucumbers, like some squashes, are heavy fruits, so make sure if you do grow them up a trellis you provide some support for the developing fruits.

Growing vegetables upward along a trellis offers you more than just a visual boost for your garden. You can actually boost production for the plant, offer more of it better access to sunlight, and protect the fruits it produces against pests and rot.

Get in Touch with Us

If you’re looking for more design ideas that you can use a trellis to create, or you just want some more advice or pointers on growing plants like these, get in touch with us. We’d be delighted to help you achieve your vision with one of the trellises available in our shop. Give us a call at 208-640-4206 today.

While you’re in our shop, don’t miss our other collection of unique and memorable gifts for your home and garden. Add a patio torch to your outdoor arrangement or think about getting some tall planters for favorite plants. You can give your home and outdoor spaces a real makeover with some of the pieces from our collection.

Where Beauty and Usefulness Meet

A trellis is one of those rare garden elements that can truly do both jobs well. It can stand beautifully on its own, support flowers and vegetables, reinforce the design of a home or garden, and make growing easier in the process. That is what makes it such a lasting favorite for gardeners and decorators alike.

Related Trellis & Garden Resources

• Shop Garden Trellises — decorative and practical trellises for many settings
• Shop Decorative Wall Trellises — design-forward pieces for indoor and outdoor walls
• Best Climbing Plants for Trellises — flowers and vines that perform beautifully on supports
• Benefits of Vertical Gardening — why trellises and supports can improve space, light, and maintenance