NOW THAT WE’VE FIRMLY established the importance of green roofs… what about green walls? There’s no reason that plants have to be relegated to horizontal surfaces — that’s inflexible human thinking. Vegetation can’t get up and walk around, but it can sure climb… the tallest tree that’s still standing on Earth reaches over 112 metres — five stories higher than the Statue of Liberty! To dispel our preconceptions about the possibilities for plant life on the Y-axis, let’s begin this trilogy of blogs about bio-walls with the work and words of the world’s best designer / builder of “vegitecture“, Patrick Blanc.
WEBSITE. BLOG. OKAY… Flickr. YouTube. Um, alright… Facebook? Twitter?! What the — ?! Is it really necessary for a landscaping company to have such a massive presence on the internet? I mean, of course I’m going to argue that it is necessary — making sure that Green Apple is well-represented on the intertubes is what I get paid for, so I have a vested interest in convincing the boss that it’s absolutely mandatory in this day and age. But even I have to admit, it’s a little bit of a stretch. We get sweaty, dig in the dirt, haul heavy materials, move huge machines. We big-muscle men! Grunt! We no talk pretty — we build backyard pretty! We strong!
TWO DAYS AGO, I promised you a blog about clover lawns as an alternative to grass. Then I took you time-travelling into history to understand the back-story. In Part I, Clover the Hills and Far Away, and Part II, Clover and Over Again, I explained how the artistic imagination of the Middle Ages triggered a new paradigm for gardening during the Renaissance. You’ve got to know where you’re coming from, if you want to figure out where you’re going, right? So now in Part III, Clover and Out, I will talk about how this new paradigm has perverted our senses of space and society, our relationships with nature and culture, and left us with a chemical legacy of lifeless monoculture. And finally, I won’t only talk about the problem, but I’ll suggest some possible solutions. So, one more time, what’s wrong with our good friend green grass, and why would we want to examine any alternatives?
IN A PREVIOUS blog entry, “Clover the Hills and Far Away“, I discussed a style of literature, plays, poetry, and painting that was invented about five hundred years ago in Venice, Italy, known as ‘pastoral’. In this blog entry, Part Two of my exploration into the origins — and prejudices — of the modern landscaping trade, I discuss how the exotic images in these pastoral paintings became the basis for a new movement in terraforming, and an corresponding ideology that has come to eclipse all other belief systems about the relationship between spaces and species.
“LOOK INTO CLOVER LAWNS.” I like it that I’m not the only one raising eco-initiatives at Green Apple. Victor is Lead Hand out in the field, and I’m pushing pixels back at the office, so he handed me the brief: Why the hay are we putting down hardly anything except for green grass? It turns out that, despite their nomenclature, of the two species of grasses that we use with our clients — Kentucky Bluegrass and Sheep’s Fescue — neither of them are native to North America. So why do we keep using them time and time again, by default? For that matter, why are ninety-nine per cent of the people on this continent carpeting their properties with identical kinds of turf, without question? To find out the answer, I decided to do some serious research into the history of horticulture.
