Posts tagged green wall
Green Design’s Vertical Gardens
Mar 9th
Green Design in Sydney, Australia, defines a vertical garden as “a unique structure that holds indoor plants in a vertical and horizontal pattern in freestanding columns and walls.” They’ve taken that definition and built a freestanding wall of planters to create a vertical garden. Their type of greenwall can be used as a unique room divider since it is freestanding. They use recyclable plastic pots and the garden is resistant to mold. They also mention the living wall would be a form of advertising for your business since everyone would be talking about it… something I hadn’t thought of.
They state that each pot can hold enough water to keep plants hydrated.. but you have to wonder how frequently they have to be watered and the work involved. If you’ve got a high green wall, you’re on a ladder each time you need to water unless you install an irrigation system. With this system, it doesn’t hide the irrigation pipes quite as nicely as a Patrick Blanc style living wall or a Woolly Pocket vertical garden… the pipes would be right out there in the open which would definitely impact the look. If you’re willing to go to the trouble of hand watering each planter, though, there’s no denying their wall looks good.
However, the company also partnered with the Green Wall Company which makes solid green walls instead of a wall of planters. That technique allows for a bigger wall with less of a watering headache. You can see in the photo below that there’s a metal resevoir holding the water which will be pumped to the top of the mini vertical garden automatically through a timer. You can’t see the irrigation pipes either.
Small Green Wall
Large green wall
Vertical garden cafe
Window sill vertical garden
Movable Green Wall
Mar 5th
This is a green wall design that can be moved from one area of your house to another. This would help if you wanted your wall to get more light or if you wanted to move it inside for the winter. You could also move the walls to change the look and feel of your yard.. much like changing your furniture around. It’s an interesting design by Maximize Design and for the movable wall, it costs 390 pounds not planted.
Movable green wall
Movable living wall
Movable vertical garden
Biowalls Explored in More Detail
Feb 25th
Biowall
A 24-square meter plant wall – more specifically a “biowall” – was built in the Robertson Building. The biowall was planted with a variety of exotic and native indoor flowering plants. Each plant has its own pocket in a special planting material (they don’t tell you the exact fabric they use). Water filters through the material to the plants’ roots and fresh air is continually pumped into the room via the living biowall.
The biowall purifies and cleans the air. The plants were chosen for their ability to tolerate indoor lighting conditions and their ability to improve indoor air quality. Some of the common contaminants come from traffic outdoors as well as off-gassing from furniture, paints, drywall, photocopiers, and human fragrances in the building.
The biowall helps filter Volatile Organic Compounds or VOC’s. VOC’s are actually a group of pollutants indoors and out. While small concentrations of these chemicals aren’t dangerous, over time they can contribute to “sick building syndrome,” which can include eye, nose, and throat irritation, headaches, and dizziness.
The biowall only needs typical plant maintenance including occasional dusting and removal of wilting foliage. Two 1000 watt lights provide supplemental lighting.
Living Biowall
A separate biowall was installed in the IL Centre. It’s 3 stories high and is aesthetically pleasing as well as acting as a biofilter which removes the VOCs and CO2 from the air.
Plants are easily swapped if they don’t thrive. The plants that work on the wall will vary depending on its requirements. Leafy ferns do better than Hibiscus, and orchids have done very well. Here’s a rundown of the plants used in the biowall:
- Aglaonema (Algaomema commutatum) & Spathiphyllum spp. (mixed aroids)
- Spider plant (Chlorophytum)
- Croton (Codiaeum)
- Cordyline
- Dragon Plant (Dracaena)
- Ficus (verigated)
- Rubber Plant (Ficus Elastica)
- Ivy (Hedera)
- Palms (Dypsis, Howea, or Chamaedorea spp.)
- Maidenhair Fern (Adiantum)
- Philodendron (several species)
- Snake plant (Sansevieria)
- Purple Heart (Setcreasea pallida, similar to the common Tradescantia)
- Umbrella Plant (Schlefera)
Diagram of basic biowall setup
Two layers of a porous material make up the fabric attached to the concrete wall. It’s 1 inch thick and is made of loosely woven plastic screwed to the wall in pieces. The top layer has slits cut into it where the plants are placed. The roots hold the plants in place and grow between the layers. The plants chosen don’t spread pollen and the constantly running water and fresh air prevent mold. A vapour barrier was installed in front of the concrete and behind the drywall to prevent moisture from spreading. What makes this vertical garden into a biowall are the fans that draw the air from each of the three floors to circulate through the building. You can see an informative flash image at queensu.
Landscape Architect Elif Bonelli’s Vertical Garden
Feb 21st
Landscape Architect Vertical Garden
Istanbul is a crowded city in Turkey that doesn’t have a lot of green space. There’s not a lot of room for landscape architects to build anything green in the downtown core. Due to the crowded space, room to garden horizontally is hard to find which means the gardens you do see are often pricey.
Landscape architecture company Botanic Garden in Istanbul began working on the Gizia Showroom. It’s a new building of one of the leading international textile companies in Turkey. The building is located in an old business area of Istanbul where it’s very crowded. Without a space for a normal garden, both the owner and the architect team got creative and decided to create the first outdoor vertical garden installation in all of Turkey.
There is a small outdoor space at the top of the building. It’s completely surrounded by high walls which means there’s no view of the city from there. The garden is a way for the eye to catch some green space while not taking up a lot of room in the small courtyard.
The living wall is 3.5m high and 6.5m wide. Steel was used to stabilize the structure with PVC sheets attached to that and then a fabric covered the PVC sheets. Pockets in the fabric were created which were then filled with perlite.
The plants in the living wall don’t need soil to provide the nutrients and support. The plants and their bare roots are stuffed into the perlite-filled pockets. The irrigation system pumps liquid soluble nutrients and water up to the top of the garden where it’s distributed across the porous fabric and perlite.
The green wall is covered by a large blue sheet of a stucco net. It gives a bright background to the plants and reinforces the contrast between nature and the concrete jungle; with nature winning! It also helps the fabric stay together as, in this case, the fabric used is organic and it may eventually start to rot. The growth of the plants will eventually cover the blue sheet to make way to a purely green wall.
