Growing Up: Vertical Gardens

Filed under: Gardening, Flowers, Garden Tours, Design, etc, News & Trends

For gardeners short on space, plantable walls have become the latest piece of horticultural real estate to obsess over.

With careful plant selection and some degree of effort to get the infrastructure and irrigation right, vertical gardens are springing up in unlikely places around the world. Here are some of our favorite examples both large and small.

1. Woolly Pocket: Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles hipsters love to garden naturally. Or at least that's what the unusual Woolly Pocket marketing campaign would suggest. It features nude Silver Lake denizens lounging around while tending hanging planted installations. The soft panels-made of hand-stitched felt lined with recycled plastic moisture barriers-can be hung on most any wall. The product's inventor, Miguel Nelson, claims they won't leak even indoors.


2. Amelia B Lima & Associates: San Diego, California
To get a sense of privacy in their gardens, most homeowners install walls, fences or hedges. However, garden designer Amelia Lima turned an otherwise plain 40 foot-long barrier into a wall garden of tropicals and ferns in her narrow San Diego side yard. To keep things interesting all year long, the lush arrangement of plants depends more on leaf pattern and color rather than flowers. All that's missing is a jungle waterfall but instead a re-circulating drip irrigation system saves on the water bill.


3. The Quai Branly Museum by Patrick Blanc: Paris, France
In a short span of time, green-haired plant scientist and author, Patrick Blanc has gone from something of an enfant terrible to become the father of the vertical garden movement. He has a number of high-profile modernist projects around the world including The Quai Branly Museum in his hometown of Paris. Inspired by planting ideas that he noticed on his excursions through tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia, his large gardens grow without soil in a special layer of felt fabric that helps insulate the planted building through all seasons. In such installations, the species are hardy enough to withstand cold French winters.


4. Flora Grubb: San Francisco, California
Bay Area nursery owner Flora Grubb sets a high bar for gardening trends in her influential San Francisco store. This wall panel is made of several 20-inch by 20-inch trays planted with a colorful tapestry of 2-inch potted succulents. The drought tolerant planting only needs to be hosed down every few days depending on the weather.

5. Hotel Bardessono by Flora Grubb: Yountville, California
Flora Grubb created another distinctive green wall at one of her garden design projects for the modernist lobby of the Hotel Bardessono near Napa. This time she installed a minimalist arrangement of air plants (aka tillandsias) attached to small metal spikes set at regular intervals. The undemanding epiphytic plants, which grow without the need of soil, are misted every few days.


6. Hotel Modera: Portland, Oregon
Landscape architects Jane Hansen and Kurt Lango created a monumental green wall for the courtyard of the Hotel Modera in Portland, Oregon using a variety of perennials and even a few small shrubs. The sideways garden leaves the main flat area free for parties or gatherings from the adjacent bar. No one would now mistake the stylish space for what it once was, the parking lot of a Days Inn Motel.




7. Flowerbox Building: New York, NY
It's not a green wall per se, but the façade of the Flowerbox Building in New York City's East Village is a veritable hanging garden of plants. Mac Carbonell of Verdant Gardens Design in Brooklyn, designed the impressive infrastructure of metal flower boxes along with architect Derek Sanders. The automatic irrigation system is connected with the new building's plumbing so that the burden of summer watering does not impose on the tenants (who may or may not be actual gardeners).

 

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