Living Pillar

Green Pillar

What used to be a stark concrete pillar has just recently been transformed by Habitat Horticulture into a living “plant pillar”. New Resource Bank, located in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district is a bank designed to help environmentally conscious businesses grow through better loan rates and green incentives.  Habitat Horticulture’s living wall is a nice addition to the banking facility’s Gold LEED certification.

Here are a few other living wall designs for indoor and outdoor use. I love the copper and steel frames/reservoirs.

Indoor Living Wall

Indoor green wall

Outdoor vertical garden

The City of New Orleans Botanical Garden highlighted how homeowners can harvest rainwater in their newly commissioned pavilion since Katrina. The building itself is 12 ft high with recycled aluminum screens and reclaimed lumber as siding.

Using vines, you could cover the structure fairly easily. You could also plant edibles such as strawberries or vegetables pretty easily with this system while creating a good looking fence. There’s a lot of function behind this design. You can see that the water drips through cone in the roof and trickles down through rocks and plants to clean the grey water. I would have liked to see the water stream from the roof to the highest part of the living fence there and stream from one planter to the next. Maybe if the water flow to the living fence was restricted to allow only a certain amount at a time to prevent the soil from washing away, and the rest was diverted to the trough they have in place at the bottom. Think that would work?

Grey water living walls

New Orleans vertical garden

Constructing rain watered plantwall

From Design Milk

Living wall panel

Here’s a solar panel combined with a vertical garden from treehugger.  This is interesting in that the builders used rocks as the growing medium. My take is the rocks would make the garden heavier than it could be, and rocks don’t hold any water. This means you’re ultimately going to have to run the pump and irrigation system more frequently. You can use rocks in hydroponics (think of all the plants out there that can grow fine with little to no dirt on cliffs), but often other hydroponic mediums such as clay pellets or perlite can be more helpful due to their water retention capabilities. That means you have to run the pump less often, using less power, and you’ll lose less to evaporation. (there’s a few more pictures below the solar panel living wall that are from treehugger as well)

Hydroponic vertical garden

California vertical garden

Container gardening on a wall not quite done right