Posts tagged living wall

Joe Zazzera and Tournesol’s Vertical Garden

Apr 28th

Joe and his company, Plant Solutions, have been providing Interior Plantscape design, installation and maintenance services in the Phoenix area since 1981. He’s actively involved in seeing indoor plants adopted into the Indoor Environmental Quality section of the LEED rating system.

According to a recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., indoor air can be up to 10 times more polluted than the air outside. A separate NASA study found interior plants can reduce airborne molds that cause sickness by as much as 50 percent. Through interiorscaping, Joe is actively helping remove VOC’s from the air in the homes and offices of his clients.

Terrascreen

Joe worked with Tournesol Siteworks to make a vertical garden from their TerraScreen product. Joe installed two of the 4′ by 4′ panels in Plant Solutions’ conference room to show prospective clients.

Terrascreen

This is how it works:

All modules are made of black powder-coated galvanized steel wire, with integral brackets to fasten the panel to the wall. Panels may be mounted adjacent to one another to create larger coverage areas.

Plants are placed in their 6″ grow pot directly into the black no-hole cachepot. The hanger system keeps the plants in place. Replacement is simple – just remove the plant from its cachepot, put another in its place.

A pressurized tank-based irrigation system is also available for the TerraScreen system. Ask your Tournesol Siteworks salesperson for details.

• Panel system stands 4-5/8” from wall, but requires minimum of 18” from wall for plants
• All TerraScreen™ systems should include a catch basin mounted below
• TerraScreen™ systems work best if wall behind panels is waterproofed and painted black.
• Approx. panel load – 170lbs. for 48”h, 250lbs. for 72”h TerraScreen™

From Joe:

The wall was easily installed with no excess engineering or parts. We mounted like-painted 1×2s first, and then mounted the panels to them. When we first put the wall in, we used it without the additional watering system. This has required a lot of maintenance time, so when we had the opportunity we retrofitted the wall with the watering system and now have to dedicate much less time to maintenance.
We show this wall to our clients, mostly law offices, that have fresh flower budgets in place. We can lease them this wall with a plant rotation for about the same price they are paying for their weekly or twice-weekly flower rotations. It’s much more of a conversation piece, everyone comments on how cools and hip it is – they cannot help it!
The plants in this wall are pothos along with Neorgilia “Medusa” for color from Olive Hill nurseries. The Neorgilia variety seems to hold up longer than other varieties, thereby providing a better return on investment – and the clients love them.

Interiorscaping

Tournesol Siteworks has a few more interesting vertical garden products out there that you may want to check out.

If you’re a vertical garden installer, please feel free to add yourself to the directory on this site – it’s free. Also, if you have questions or design ideas, or projects, you can post them to the forum. This is a great spot to connect with others that are looking to build or install greenwalls. If you’re interested in our website traffic stats (I’m a stats junky myself) you can see greentopsites.com. If you have created a living wall that you’d like to see featured here, let me know!

Vertical Garden in Jamieson Place Calgary, Alberta

Apr 12th

Posted by Gavin in Living Walls

7 comments

Greenery Office Interiors is owned by a Calgarian, Joanne Young, who recently installed the largest living wall in Western Canada in Jamieson Place. They used a pre-planted modular vertical gardening system to create two walls inside the building. The living walls get natural light via huge skylights in the ceiling and are drip fed on a timed irrigation system. The small wall is 750 sq ft and the large wall is 1200 sq ft… there are over 20,000 plants in 20 different varieties!

I love the way they’re collecting the water from the irrigation system. They have dark stones setup above a grate so the water trickles through the vertical garden and into the reservoir while hiding the grate itself. It gives a great, natural look. Global TV’s Gil Tucker did an interview that you can see here.

They used McRae’s Modular Greenwall System which includes a special growing foam, a powder coated metal grid and a waterproof backing. Each grid can be either pregrown or planted in place. You don’t need to clean the dirt off the plants.. just stuff the plants into the foam right from 3″ pots. The roots can easily spread in the foam and it gives the right combination of air and water to help the plants grow. You can see a diagram of the system at the bottom of this post.