Green Walls, Living Walls, Vertical Gardens, call it what you may, they have arrived, and are here to stay! It is not surprising to see these living walls dominate the internet searches on modern contemporary garden design ideas. Modern, contemporary – yeah right!!
Vertical gardens began as an experiment in 1988 by Patrick Blanc, a French botanist intent on creating agarden without soil. An experiment which might have altered the way we think about urban or domestic space as a whole.
In theory, these green walls started off twenty three years ago, yet have taken years to make an appearance. Not just that, but has become so popular, that they now globally dominate landscape design as we see it.This is evident when you see most recent photos of the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show
It makes sense that designer Patrick Blanc intended to make use of the limited space there was in the city of Paris, and therefore turned the average wall into something vibrant, yet living.
The exact same principal applies for us today. Properties are shrinking as the demand for space upsurges. The offspring of generations who once lived on acres of land, with elegant gardens and lakes and ducks (for heaven sakes), are now faced with constrained gardens – if they have the luxury of owning a garden! Generally speaking the average city slicker aged 20 – 30 year hardly has anything more than a balcony on the 10th floor of a block of apartments!
As the demand for space increases, the actual floor space decreases. Therefore I believe these innovative living walls are the best solution to the problem! Basically, all you need is vertical space, and of that, we have plenty! Not forgetting the added bonuses of aesthetically greening the average city apartment's balcony, providing recycled air in offices and even acts as an effective noise buffer – as plants are masters at absorbing noise pollution. Therefore it promotes healthy green living to nearly every residential property with insignificant or limited outdoor space.
What could be better to grow and use fresh home-grown herbs from an entire wall of herbs, with selections to dream of! (Woolworths eat your heart out!) Although these walls are quite technical, everyone can afford and maintain them, especially if it (and it should) contains an automated drip irrigation system. Apart from directing some of the plant growth to cover the wall, all that’s needed is to clear out dead leaves, and trim the plants in order for them to remain bushy, like you generally would in a conventional garden.
We at Project Green Landscape Studio had an attempt at creating these living walls. Our first project was a 2.5m by 4m (10m²) backyard which leads form the kitchen door. The obvious choice was to install a green wall that took up almost no space, and have the dual purpose of feeding the family. Therefore I designed an herb wall with a variety of about 20 herbs, lettuce and edible flower plants. The herb box is filled with a lightweight organic medium, with added water retention crystals.
One of our more prominent Vertical walls were designed to cover a garden shed in a 36m² sized cottage garden. The wall is two meters in height, and 7 meters long, but only takes up 2.8m² of garden space (as the wall is only 400mm wide). Quite simply put, we added 14m² of planting space to an average city garden.
The technique was quite different to the first one, as this is a self-supporting wall, and didn’t need the support of the existing boundary walls. After only two months, it’s quite evident that the plants are happy in their new (vertical) habitat.
The concept has gradually but confidently crept into urban spaces here in the World Design Capital 2014, Cape Town. Tractor outdoor, an independent outdoor media company has effectively made use of this concept by using it as an innovative advertising catch for Emirates Airlines on the ever popular Kloof street in the c.b.d. For more on this green wall, follow this link: http://www.capetown2014.co.za/2011/09/cape-towns-blooming-billboard/ We might have finally found the solution to diminishing urban space, or to the aesthetics of outdated cement facades, but more importantly, we might have found the solution to adding green, living, and oxygen producing plant life, where it might not be viable to plant a tree, which in return would still assist us in the battle against global warming.
Here one of Patrick Blanc's Green walls flank the side of an apartment block
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