Balcony gardens

The designers of these five Balcony Gardens, on Royal Hospital Way, have filled their 5m wide x 2m deep spaces with a variety of different plants, at different heights. Many have found room for trees or shrubs that provide privacy, and for edible plants, grown at plucking height. Nicola Hale’s Landform Balcony Garden shows how you can make your balcony a wildlife corridor by filling it with plants that attract pollinators, especially bees. Martha Krempel’s Arcadia (shown) transports the owner, who reclines on a swinging daybed made from reclaimed hardwood, to an exotic place full of lush planting with a distant landscape painted on the house wall to complete the illusion. James Smith’s Green Sky Pocket Garden shows how you can use green roof technology to plant up a balcony floor with a mix of evergreens and herbaceous plants and have space for multi-stemmed trees, wall planters filled with herbs and edibles, and a timber bench. The containers in Alexandra Noble’s Balcony of Blooms form a continuous planted edge, maximising planting space, while Michael Coley’s Sky Sanctuary is a shady, high-rise balcony, with planting in recycled plastic containers.