Living Walls
AS WE BEGIN TO BUILD our own living wall systems here at Green Apple headquarters, Peter sent me out on a field trip to check out the two existing vertical gardens in the GTA. I snapped up these photographs yesterday at the Robertson Building in downtown Toronto, and at the Guelph-Humber College building in the west end. My mission was to get up close and personal with these green walls, and document their construction details. These is a real dearth of this kind of information out there on the web; there are no small amount of flashy photographs of finished walls, but very little in the way of practical schematics for D-I-Y wall builders. So I’m uploading these image files up to the blog, so that the next wanna-be bio-wall builder that comes along will have an easier time of it. And if you do decide to go ahead and build one by yourself, send us some photos and a testimonial, so we can take part in your eco-joy!
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.
