A bare house wall: greening a façade without damage or disputes – guide

Editorial team·updated on 15 Sep 2026

Deadlines, funding rates, responsible offices, projects and events in this guide come live from our records. They are not written into the text and are not maintained twice.

The side wall of your building is grey, six metres high, and in July it throws the heat straight into the courtyard. Green, it would be nicer, cooler and quieter. It would also be the most common cause of an argument in the house – because façade greening touches three things that make neighbours and owners sensitive: the fabric of the building, its appearance, and the public space in front of it.

Your starting point

A façade is always shared or someone else's. As a tenant you need the consent of the owner or the managing agent, because a trellis on the wall is a structural alteration; get it in writing, or you will be arguing about removal when you move out. In a Wohnungseigentümergemeinschaft (condominium owners' association) greening is a structural alteration under the Wohnungseigentumsgesetz: it has to be resolved or permitted. As a sole owner you decide – but not about the pavement in front.

Three facts before you choose any plant: the wall area and which way it faces, the condition of the render (cracks, loose patches, external insulation system) and the ground situation at the foot of the wall. Pavement, cellar or concrete down there decides the whole construction method.

Is this realistic?

There are two fundamentally different routes. Ground-bound means the plant roots in soil and grows upwards – either as a self-climber with adhesive organs directly on the wall, or on a trellis held away from it. That is the cheap, robust, common Berlin solution. Wall-bound means a technical system of substrate pockets and irrigation mounted on the wall. It looks green quickly, costs several times as much, needs servicing, and dies within weeks if the irrigation fails.

The decisive question is the render. Self-climbers such as ivy or Virginia creeper belong only on an intact, crack-free, solid wall. Their adhesive organs hold so firmly that they take render with them in a later renovation; they grow into cracks; and an external insulation system with a few millimetres of reinforcement coat is off limits for them. For anything not unquestionably solid and sound, a trellis with twining climbers – clematis, honeysuckle – is the right answer. Wisteria grows magnificently and develops forces that bend light trellises; it wants a sturdy system.

Not realistic: a dense green wall in the first year. Ground-bound greening needs three to five years to get there. What it looks like in Berlin once it does:

Step by step

1. Have the wall checked Look at the wall close up: cracks, hollow-sounding render, damp damage, insulation? Stopping point: where cracks or an external insulation system are involved, self-climbers drop out of the selection. If a façade renovation is due anyway, do that first – greening afterwards is cheaper than taking greening down again.
2. Get consent in writing Ask the landlord or the managing agent; in an owners' association prepare the resolution. Write down who maintains it, who is liable, and what happens on moving out or selling. Stopping point: do not drill without written consent.
3. Settle the foot of the wall Is there open soil at the base? How deep, how wide, is there a cellar or are there services underneath? Where ground bonding is technically impossible, raised beds or large planters are the alternative – for state funding they must hold at least two hundred litres and be half a metre high.
4. Clarify special use if the pavement is affected If the trellis or planting bed stands on public street land – including the strip of pavement nearest the building – that is a Sondernutzung (special use). You need a special use permit from your district's Straßen- und Grünflächenamt, and it usually carries a fee. Stopping point: those fees are expressly excluded from the funding; budget for them separately.
5. Ask about monument protection and fire safety If the building is a listed monument or lies near one, changing its appearance needs permission. And greenery must not grow over windows, escape routes or fire service access – on tall buildings this question belongs in the planning, not in the following summer.
6. Choose system and plants A trellis held away from the wall, securely anchored, with a climbing aid matched to how the species climbs. The technical benchmark is the façade greening guidelines of the Forschungsgesellschaft Landschaftsentwicklung Landschaftsbau. Insect-friendly native species achieve more than uniform evergreen walls.
7. Plant, tie in, water A generous planting hole with good soil, protect the root zone from compaction, water regularly for the first two years and actively guide the shoots onto the frame. Skip the tying in and you get a heap instead of a wall.
8. Put the cutting back in the calendar Once a year clear windows, gutters, roof edge and escape routes. Stopping point: under the Bundesnaturschutzgesetz (federal nature conservation act) radical cutting back of woody plants is prohibited from 1 March to 30 September – gentle shaping and maintenance cuts remain allowed. Where birds are nesting, nothing is cut at all.

Time and cost

Time: consent, permit questions and planning stretch over weeks; the planting itself is a weekend. The real time is worked by the plant: three to five years until it covers the surface.

Cost: editorial market ranges, not quotations. Ground-bound with self-climbers sits at the lower end, roughly 15 to 35 euros per square metre; with a trellis and twining climbers you land at roughly 80 to 250 euros depending on the system; wall-bound systems start at around 400 euros per square metre. Add special use fees if the pavement is affected, and soil replacement at the foot of the wall where needed.

Upkeep: ground-bound roughly 10 to 20 euros per square metre a year, wall-bound several times that – there everything depends on the irrigation technology. A climbing frame is a building component: it gets inspected, not forgotten.

What are you allowed to do?

Consent comes before everything else. For tenants that of the owner, in an owners' association a resolution under the Wohnungseigentumsgesetz. This is not a formality: a trellis fixed without consent can be removed at your expense, and any damage to the building is then down to you as well.

Public pavement. Anything reaching beyond the property line into public street land – planting bed, planter, frame – is a Sondernutzung and needs a permit from the district Straßen- und Grünflächenamt; it usually carries a fee, and accessibility and traffic safety take priority.

Monument protection. For monuments and in their immediate surroundings, changing the appearance needs permission under the Denkmalschutzgesetz Berlin; the lower monument protection authority in the Bezirk is responsible.

Neighbours and species protection. For plants at the property boundary the Nachbarrechtsgesetz Berlin sets minimum distances – half a metre for shrubs, one and a half metres for most trees, three metres for vigorous species, one metre for hedges over two metres high. And a greened wall is a habitat: radical cutting back is prohibited nationwide from 1 March to 30 September.

Matching funding

GründachPLUS funds façades too – ground-bound from fifty and wall-bound from ten square metres of vegetated area – with a share of the eligible costs that rises if you link roof and façade into one water cycle. Three conditions decide more often than the rate does: the wall must be intact (façade renovation and insulation are not eligible), it must be an existing building, and the address must lie in the funding area. Wall-bound greening is funded only if its irrigation comes wholly or partly from rainwater retention systems – a cistern, a rain collector, a retention roof. Twelve months of establishment care by a specialist firm is a binding part of the project. Current rates, deadlines and sources are in the dataset, not in this text:

In Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf there are additional district courtyard programmes for which tenants are expressly eligible – if your wall faces the courtyard, that is the faster route. For frame, anchoring and species selection a specialist firm is worth it:

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