Posts tagged living wall
Lincoln Center Atrium’s Living Wall
Mar 7th
I love the closeup of the wall below. It clearly shows each plant growing out of a little felt pocket. Some walls use perlite, others dirt, and others just let the plant’s bare roots sit in the pocket. There’s typically two layers of felt at a minimum. The front blanket of felt has the rips and the back felt blanket is one solid piece of synthetic felt. The 20 ft high wall of plants was designed by Tod Williams Bille Tsien Architects.
You can see the green wall was planted using a style similar to Patrick Blanc’s. Plants were grouped together in long, artsy lines at a gentle angle. Although this wall only used green plants, the different shades and textures on the wall make it very eye-catching. From curbed
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.
Alyssa’s Vertical Garden in Washington
Jan 11th
Outdoor vertical garden
Alyssa from http://akitverticalgarden.blogspot.com has made a living wall in Washintgon that allows her to grow flowers and edibles such as parsley and lettuce vertically.
Alyssa mentioned that her game plan was to build a vertical wall of dirt then plant it. They had some questions first such as: How would we stabilize it? What will we make it out of? How thick CAN we make it? How will we water it? Where should we put it where both sides of the wall will get enough sun? How can we make it where the wall with not bow out with all the weight of the dirt and gallons and gallons of water? What could we plant that would grow well on the side of a wall? They tried googling it, but couldn’t find any answers because no one has posted about a garden like this before.
Fortunately Alyssa gave a detailed account of what they did. First they set posts in concrete several feet down. The actual wall is built of hogwire with shadecloth layered on the inside. The shadecloth holds in the dirt. To prevent bowing they completely wired the inside. Once stabilized, they added a whole lot of dirt.
Alyssa notes that you don’t want to plant until AFTER the dirt has settled. She originally tried planting while the dirt was dry and just thrown in. When the dirt sunk it threw all the plants and the holes for the plants off kilter. So the best thing is to water it thoroughly and start planting from the bottom. Alyssa says she needed to replant several Parsleys which were swallowed by the wall as the dirt settled.
Outdoor living wall
Building the edible vertical garden
The structure of the wall is built of three things: posts to support the wall, wire (hogwire and chicken wire), and Typar. The posts were cemented several feet into the ground to support the large structure. On each side of the posts, a foot apart, the sides of the wall were erected. After the sides were thoroughly wired to the posts and to each other, the wall was filled dirt.
Planting the vertical garden
It is very simple to plant in the wall. You need three basic tools: a razor knife, a shovel, and wire cutters. I would recommend wearing gardening gloves because the wires can be rough on the hands. Simply cut the wires and bend them back making ample room for whatever you are planting. Then slit the Typar the appropriate size. Shovel out the dirt and gently place your plant inside. Within a few days your plant will begin to grow skyward. It is very exciting to see watch it grow up!
What kind of things grow well on the living wall?
I found lots of things that grow well in the living wall, especially salad greens. Any sort of mustard, lettuce, kale, pac choi, etc. does exceedingly well. I have grown many herbs (Thyme, Marjoram, Oregano, Parsley) and flowers. Petunias are perhaps the best flowers to plant in the wall. They do a great job of covering and flowing. Any climbing vines or flowers are fabulous! Both tomatoes and chard have done really well in the vertical garden.
Outdoor green wall
How to add nutrients
Use liquid fertilizer (MiracleGro) and to pour small amounts into each hole using a watering can.
How to water
A soaker hose at the top. Not much water is needed as the wall generally stays pretty wet. Each plant is watered when it’s planted in the green wall.
Vertical vegetable garden
Living Wall vegetable garden
Vertical vegetable garden
Cheap Do It Yourself vertical gardens
Jan 3rd
How to make a living wall
These vertical gardens can be built and designed by you on a budget. These were found from http://www.lushe.com.au.
Bag and Plant
The first one is an easy-to-build vertical garden made out of a hessian bag.. or really almost any type of mesh bag.. stuffed with rockwool. Just cut some slits in the bag and the rockwool, stuff in your plants and water them. The rockwool holds the water and nutrients while retaining enough air pockets for the roots to grow and thrive.
The downside may be that you’d have to manually water it and you could only use it outside (no vapour barrier or water catch basin).. but the upside is that it’s super easy to make and very cheap. The rockwool is able to hold onto the water for a decent period of time as well.. so the watering wouldn’t be too much of a burden.
Bamboo Living Wall
Bamboo hung horizontally on a wall with holes cut out to allow a place to put the dirt and the plants. The trick with this one would be the watering – it’d be pretty tough to water without the dirt falling out the ends of the bamboo unless the ends were capped.
Cheap living wall
Mosaic Living Wall
Painted Terracotta pots hung on a wall. You could go restrained or all out with this idea. With that big one.. watering must be a nightmare.
Wall planters
mosaic wall garden
Shelf for Vertical Gardens
A shelf system that the plants simply sit on. The shelves are then covered by waterproof plywood (could use marine ply.. or perhaps plywood treated with linseed oil.) with sections cut out to give room for the plants. You could paint the plywood whatever colour you want and that’d also help with waterproofing if you use the right kind of paint. The plants used are bromeliads.
Vertical Garden shelves
What do you think? Would you use any of these vertical gardens yourself?
