Plant Wall Art

Choosing Plant Wall Art

The first question most people ask about a plant print is how green it is going to be, and it is the right question to ask. Greens vary enormously across this subject: a botanical line study is barely green at all, a big leaf photograph is a solid block of it, and a dried grass or palm image sits closer to beige than to anything you would call foliage. Work out which of those three you are after and most of the choosing is already done.

Line and silhouette versions are the workhorses. They behave like pattern rather than picture, carry very little visual weight, and survive being hung on the magnolia walls of a rented flat. Photographic close-ups are the opposite: heavy, glossy in feel, and demanding of clear space around them.

Scale follows from that. A leafy photograph has to be big enough for the leaf to read as a leaf rather than a green smudge, which usually means larger than people first plan for. A line drawing carries no such requirement and can sit happily in a small format beside a door frame or above a light switch.

There is a trap in hanging plant art directly above real plants. The living one wins every time, and the print behind it quietly becomes wallpaper. Give the image its own wall, or at least its own clear stretch of one, and let the actual foliage do its work elsewhere in the room.

A useful check for this subject is to look at the image in the room's evening light rather than its daylight. Green is the colour most changed by warm bulbs — it dulls and drifts towards brown — and a plant print that sings at noon can look tired by nine at night, which in most sitting rooms is the hour that actually counts.