Choosing the Right Wooden Trellis for Your Houseplants

A wooden trellis is one of the simplest, most attractive ways to support a climbing houseplant — but with a few different styles and sizes to choose from, it's worth knowing which one actually suits your plant before you buy. Here's how we'd guide you through it.

Why We Use Solid Cedar, Not Plywood

You'll find plenty of wooden plant trellises on the market made from plywood rather than solid timber. Plywood is cheaper to produce, which is why it's common — but it's worth knowing the trade-offs before you buy.

Plywood is made from thin layers of wood veneer glued together under pressure. In a dry environment, this works perfectly well, but a plant pot is a consistently damp environment by design, and plywood's layered construction makes it more vulnerable to that moisture over time — the glue bonds between layers can weaken, and the material is more prone to delaminating (the layers separating) or warping the longer it's exposed to a moist growing medium.

Solid Western Red Cedar doesn't have this problem. It's a single, naturally water-resistant timber all the way through, with no glued layers to weaken or separate. It's part of why we chose it specifically for a product that's going to spend its life sitting in damp LECA or PON, rather than a drier, more typical woodworking application. All of our trellises, whichever style suits your plant, are made from solid cedar for exactly this reason.

Axis: The Slim Starter Trellis

If you're supporting a smaller or younger climbing plant, our Axis trellis is a great place to start. It's a slim, single support — unobtrusive, easy to insert into an existing pot, and ideal for plants that aren't yet putting on the size and weight of a mature specimen.

Axis comes with velcro plant tape included, making it easy to gently secure your plant's stem to the trellis as it grows, without needing to source ties separately. It's particularly well suited to smaller Pothos, young Philodendron, and Syngonium — plants that are just beginning to show climbing tendencies and need gentle, early guidance rather than heavy-duty support.

Flux: Our Most Popular All-Rounder

Flux is our most popular trellis, and it's easy to see why. It's a little taller and wider than Axis, with a lovely fluid, retro-inspired design that stands out as a genuine piece of styling in its own right, not just a plant support. It comes with plant clips included, making it easy to attach your plant as it climbs.

Like Quadra, Flux works well across a wide range of houseplants, from Pothos and Philodendron to young Monstera — it's a genuinely versatile choice if you want something that looks as good as it performs, and it's the one most of our customers reach for first.

Orvo and Quadra Doubles: Room to Grow

For plants that are established, or that you know are going to put on significant size over time, our Orvo and Quadra double trellises are designed to extend as your plant grows. Rather than needing to size up to a completely new trellis every time your plant outgrows its current support, a double trellis gives you room to grow into from the start.

This makes them a particularly good choice for larger aroids like mature Monstera, Philodendron, and Rhaphidophora — plants that can put on a lot of growth in a single season once they're established and climbing well. Rather than replacing a trellis every year, a double gives your plant somewhere to keep going.

How to Decide

If you're still not sure, here's a simple way to think it through:

• Young or small plant, just starting to climb? Go with Axis.
• Established, fast-growing plant that's likely to need more support soon? Go with an Orvo or Quadra double.
• Not sure, or want one trellis that suits most situations? Go with Flux.

The Bottom Line

The right wooden trellis really comes down to where your plant is now, and where it's heading. A slim single support like Axis suits a plant just beginning to climb, a double gives an established plant room to keep growing without needing replacing, and Flux sits comfortably in the middle as a genuinely versatile choice — and because every one of them is made from solid cedar rather than plywood, you're not trading durability for style either way.

All of our wooden trellises are hand-finished from Western Red Cedar, right here in Cornwall. Browse our full range of wooden plant trellises to find the right fit for your climbing houseplant.