Vertical Gardens
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!
ON SOME LEVEL, THERE’S nothing really revolutionary about green walls. Any city worth its salt has a smattering of old architecture in its downtown core with leafy green vines climbing up its Corinthian facade. We call these buildings part of our collective heritage, and we protect them from market forces, making sure they stay where they are, despite the real estate race going on around them. And the older the better! In the most exaggerated examples, we call them wonders of the world and make pilgrimages to these places of beauty, as in the Angkor Temples of Cambodia, pictured below. There’s something primal about vines intertwining that touches an emotional chord for most humans — probably something to do with our simian ancestry. But climbing vines are just one vertical possiiblity — there’s no reason to stop there, at the monocultural option.
IT’S BEEN SIX WEEKS since we brought up the topic of green walls. Back in July, we introduced you to Patrick Blanc’s marvelous vertical gardens. Contrary to what one might expect, his three-dimensional vegetal sculptures bloom beautifully, indoors as well as out. In Beautiful Blanc Walls, we saw a hotel and a shopping mall in Thailand, and an opera house in Taiwan with gorgeous greenery crawling up vertical surfaces. So it begs the question: would it work in a residential setting in Toronto? Could Green Apple build green walls in your home?
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.
