United Kingdom

I have a house in Mexico that has just been finished. We have high (for Mexico) walls all round the house, but being 6' 4" I can see over them. What I'm planning on doing this Summer is having someone build me a wooden fence on top of the walls so it's about another 1.5m higher all round. The fence will be planks on alternate sides of a post (like in the attached, but hopefully better!).

The wall, is a plain washed white and I want to plant it with a vertical garden so we have plants at the bottom 2m and a fence above that to give us the privacy.

The purpose of the vertical garden is to look really cool, but also to provide something that will hopefully keep the mosquitoes out of the garden.

So, my questions are:
1. What plants do I need to get in order to create the vertical garden?
2. What's the best way to plant them (a frame that the plants hide, or something else)?
3. What plants will keep mosquitoes away, or if there are none suitable for this, what plants are hardy enough to be sprayed regularly with Deet (or a citronella based spray) to keep the mosquitoes down?

This is Mexico, so plants that are happy in direct sunlight all day every day would be best. I'm taking a Claber Colibri irrigation system with me in the Summer so It'll be watered daily (or as necessary according to the Amazon Alexa enabled watering system). I was thinking to run the watering system pipe across the top of the wall (bottom of the fence) but any advice on that would be appreciated.

We have a guy doing the garden for us, but this is a bit out of the ordinary for Mexico, so the usual rye grass with a few desert plants is probably not going to cut it, which kind of leaves my garden "expert" a bit stuck.

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

• 5 Jul, 2018