Also known as Wooly Wally Pockets, these fantastic wall gardens use the strenght and absorbency of natural wool fibres to store and grow some amazing indoor vertical gardens.

The design allows the pockets to conserve water without dripping. As the foliage grows and blends together the vertical garden takes on an amazing character feature that makes a great talking piece, a haven in a favourite corner and a living ornament all in one.

Imagine starting spring early with a few brightly coloured crocuses peeping through lush green foliage.  A more permanent feature of exotic house plants.  An outdoor wall of busy lizzies or a living waterfall of trailing plants – the vertical garden gives you the choice to be as creative with your planting as any picture book.

Garden Beet has two blogs where you can read about garden design and no mess gardening, or ask questions on how to create your own living, environmentally friendly art work.

Vertical Garden, Wooly Wally Pockets.

Fascinating.. Check out these Green Walls in Paris… aka vertical gardens

(thanks to Richard of Artmob in B-more)

Just got a link to better photos of the green walls at the musee de quai Branly. See below:

This comes from http://deconarch.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/ There is more info on that link on the architect and his work. Amazing…

The chart above (click for larger size) is a first effort to analyze three types of vertical urban gardens: small business, corporate and residential. I am interested in plant selection, public access, design and construction, maintenance, temporal dimension, and green space benefits.

As I collect more images and thoughts about green urban space, I will post more of these photo analyses. Please let me know what you think.

Mitsubishi Estates, one of Japan’s largest real estate companies, has created a comprehensive plan for the downtown business district of Otemachi-Marunouchi-Yurakucho, where it owns one third of the land.

Mitsubishi Estates’ size and ecological principles lead the company to think beyond the scale of individual buildings. District heating, cooling and hot water systems provide energy efficiency for 65 buildings. Rooftop greening lowered summer temperatures 25 degrees celsius compared with concrete slab roofs, mitigating the heat island effect. Other efforts to lower the summer temperatures include sidewalk sprinklers, street trees, vertical gardens, and permeable sidewalks and roadways.

I am impressed that Mitsubishi Estates is not only improving the environment and efficiency of its own buildings, but taking a leading role in improving the city’s environment. Working on the district level, Mitsubishi Estates relates their greening efforts to a larger goal of using their district to connect cooler breezes from Tokyo Bay across the office towers and into the Imperial Palace grounds and other parts of central Tokyo.

• Mitsubishi Estates Creating Communities Known for Their Environmental Harmony (pdf 1.1 MB)

Everytime I go to designsponge.com I’m consumed with a constant sense of “want.”

OOOOH, look at that!

How did they do that?

I would never think of doing that!

and FINALLY…

I WANT THAT!!!

The blog has done it twice to me today. And my mind and virtual pocket book are about to explode. You all know my love of Mediterranean plants, I’m sure you’re sick of reading the “S” word on this blog. So I won’t type it, not once. I’ll just show you many links and pictures of them to follow! Beware…it’s coming!

The first mind blowing experience granted to me by designsponge.com this morning was with this post. Flora Grubb (perfect name for a lady that has a thriving plant business) has this great shop in San Francisco. And if you remember, last week I posted about this, and today was so happy to find its origin. There are so many other vertical gardens that this lady has been a part of. I just want an entire wall in my house to look like that. Growing art…what a concept!

The second mind blowing experience can be seen here. You’ll see the orb accessory in the bedroom and living room images and a few closeups of it. I visited the site she said she bought it at….go here. They’re pretty affordable, but still a little more than I’d care to pay. But good friend Alec suggested I use a fish bowl to recreate this sweet creation. Maybe I will…but I think I need to take a healthy break from potting these little treasures, for now at least.

Related to previous posts about innovative ideas and thinking outside the box, these companies have really capitolized on the recent soul-searching trends we Americans are going through: economizing on space, reducing our footprint, and getting creative with their food budgets…urban bee keeping and wall gardens. Who would have thunk it?

Fortnum & Mason is now taking theurban bee hive to a new level—the famous London retailer has placed four hives on the roof of its 181 Piccadilly building. From where, as Fortnum’s describes, the bees are able to “fly high above Mayfair, visiting the grounds, gardens and squares of the best addresses in London, gathering rather superior nectar.” (The colony was previously housed by Fortnum’s in Shropshire and Oxfordshire.)

Honey from your rooftop really is sweater.

Pollen from chestnut and lime trees, as well as a wide variety of other flowering plants, is expected to make for a delicate urban honey, which will be on sale from May 2009. A 227g jar of Piccadilly Honey will be priced at GBP 10. Completing the picture, Fortnum & Mason offers an upclose view of the palatial beehives via two webcams.

Website: www.fortnumandmason.com/Fortnums-Bees/Home.aspx

Not to be outdone, Smith and Hawken have developed the Vertical Garden…conveniently sold out so I wouldn’t choke on the price.

Gives "made locally" a whole new meaning.

Get your garden growing—vertically. This ingenious living wall is great for growing a garden in small spaces—indoors or out. Plant one or display in multiples to create a living, oxygenating work of art in your entryway, kitchen, or balcony…anywhere that receives direct sunlight.

• All the trend in Europe, plant yours to create a living, oxygenating work of art
• Includes 2 planting panels—each panel accommodates 22 quarts of soil—so there are 90 total planting “cells”
• Plant with fresh foliage, colorful flowers, or grow aromatic herbs in your kitchen
• For use indoors and outdoors; built in water-catchment tray allows kit to be used indoors (and keeps your floors dry, too!)
• Innovative, easy to plant and eco-friendly
• Vertical design is great for balconies, decks and patios—wherever space is tight
• Wall may be left freestanding or mounted for added stability; mounting strip included
• Our large Vertical Wall includes 1 Cedar Frame, 2 Planting Panels (45 planting cells each), 1 Water Reservoir Tray, 1 Water Collection Tray
• Mounting and comprehensive planting instructions also included
• Frame is crafted by hand from cedar

Spring has definitely sprung in New York. Everywhere I go my eyes and nose (and allergies) take in the beautiful buds of trees and flowers that have lain dormant all winter through.  That has me thinking about urban greenery. It’s still somewhat surprising to me how much of it I get to see here in the concrete jungle that is New York. In addition to the myriad parks in the city, most streets are lined with trees, and this is to say nothing of the rooftop gardens that are visible for those who choose to look up at them. The general idea seems to be that just because you live/work in a high rise, you don’t need to be deprived of greens.

Today this concept is becoming even more prevalent, as architects and artists everywhere seek to add green elements to buildings.  This makes not only for sustainable structures but atheistically interesting as well. To this end, Exit Art has a new exhibit up right now, in conjunction with  SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics). Vertical Gardens presents audiences with architectural models, renderings and more, all imagining green urban spaces in various forms.

These visions, both imaginary and real, look to the future of green architecture, from green roofs to vertical gardens and from Florida’s Jacksonville Library to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. And then there are those visions that take greening even further: indoor gardens that not only green buildings but give a whole new meaning to the term locavore, full walls of garden that are not only pretty but harness solar power which can then be used as other forms of power and even vintage articles that demonstrate that such things are not an entirely new concept. New or not, though, they are certain to amaze.

Exit Art
475 Tenth Avenue at 36th Street
Hours: 10am -6pm (Tues – Thurs), 10am-8pm (Fri), noon-8pm (Sat). Closed Sunday and Monday.
Cost: $5 suggested donation

Recently, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur  (D – Ohio) held the summit, “City in a Garden”, at the Toledo Botanical Gardens to explain her initiatives with the stimulus money that is available for Urban Agriculture programs. She also highlighted the potential of the 9th District (Lucas, Ottawa, Erie and Lorain Counties) to solve their struggle to feed the growing number of hungry citizens with locally grown food.

Incase you are unfamiliar with the various efforts that fulfill the concepts of local food and urban agriculture, we recommend the article Growing Food Locally: Integrating Agriculture into the Built Environment. In it, you’ll find the following topics:

Erie County and surrounding areas have an opportunity to provide for themselves.

• The Case for Building Integrated Food
• Farming and Gardening Vacant Land in Our Cities
• Commercial Farming Operations
• SPIN Farming
• Community Gardens
• Permaculture Landscaping
• Farming Our Rooftops

- Green Rooftops & Container Farming
- Rooftop Greenhouses with Soil
- Structural Loading Issues for Rooftop Greenhouses
- Rooftop Hydroponic Greenhouses

• Aquaponics
• Growing Food inside Buildings
• Chickens and Livestock in the City
• Recycling Food Waste
• Vertical Farms

CIFT's Vertical Hydroponic System can be set up in an empty parking lot or on a roof top.

- Vertical Gardening

Here is an abstract that gives a brief summary of the article:

Tremendous energy is expended transporting food from fields around to world to our tables. Large-scale, centralized food production is vulnerable to disease and other threats, and there are health benefits to more local food production. In this context, there is growing interest in producing food closer to home, even in urban areas.

 

There are two broad approaches to more localized food production. First, the vacant land around buildings—which comprises about 15% of urban land nationwide—can be turned into productive gardens and farmland. There are thousands of community gardens and hundreds agricultural enterprises (both nonprofit and for-profit) that are converting this unused, urban land into productive land for vegetables, fruits, and other crops. In some urban farms, isolation from contaminated soils is provided with a layer of clay.

Second, there is a tremendous amount of commercial roof area in urban and suburban locations, and some of this space is suitable for productive green roofs or rooftop greenhouses. With greenhouses, soil-based growing is practiced by some, but most growers have turned to lighter-weight hydroponics (growing in which nutrient solutions replace soil). The innovative field of aquaponics marries aquaculture (fish farming) with hydroponics to permit ecological systems in which fish waste provides the fertilizer for plant growth.

Both of these approaches offer challenges to architects and farmers alike. Finding plots on the ground that are uncontaminated and receive enough sun for vegetables can be difficult in dense urban centers, and rooftop systems can easily overload existing structural supports if not carefully planned.

An observation from Eat. Drink. Better.,

Urban agriculture has been used by the United Nations in many developing countries to encourage a healthy food chain and to generate jobs in the poorest cities of the world. Conversely, a few enterprising Canadians started farming their backyard and their neighbors’ backyards two decades ago with the mission of reconnecting North Americans to sustainable farming methods. As a direct result of their labors, new methods for intensive planting and harvesting in order to generate much greater yields from small plots of land have been developed to make farming in the city not just possible, but quite often profitable.

The co-founders of The Erie Wire and Local Food Sandusky are going to be launching the Erie Community Gardening Collective in order to bring the success of these concepts to our area. If you’d like more information on how you can be involved, please contact Lauren Berlekamp by emailing her at lcberlekamp@gmail.com. We encourage you to read the report on Congresswoman Kaptur’s summit published on The Erie Wire. For more on this topic, we recommend the articles at www.cityfarmer.info

“The vertical garden is something closer to a living painting than a garden.”

- Patrick Blanc

The French botanist Patrick Blanc has been creating what Ping Magazine calls, “organic wallpapers” since 1988.

To replace soil,  Blanc uses a lightweight structure composed of  a metal frame, a 1cm thick sheet of pvc, and a layer of felt. The plants put roots through the felt without damaging the walls of the building, and a mineral complex mixed with water flows evenly through the living tapestry from the top of the wall.

Blanc notes that the walls can reduce energy consumption because they have an insulating effect similar to that of green roofs and that they cleanse the air with the same or greater efficiency than plants with their roots in the ground. The vertical gardens require minimal human intervention after installation and can support richly textured plant life over a multitude of surfaces.

This scientist/landscape architect has even created a dress out of living plants:

Check out his website for more.

During our short stop in Huntsville, Sue and Steve treated Michael and me to lunch at Westin Hotel’s Sage Grill (where I feasted on my first fried green tomato ever—now I know what the fuss is about!). Afterward, we browsed the shops at Bridge Street Town Centre, one of Huntsville’s newest shopping malls. I was immediately drawn to the “living walls” at the Anthropologie store. New York-based Elmslie Osler Architect designed the store as well as the living wall—the largest in North America. The installation is constructed with two foot by two foot panels that are three inches deep. The container trays were filled with growing medium and pre-planted with seeds from various sedums. The walls bloom in the spring and stay green throughout the milder winter months in Huntsville. They serve another purpose—extra insulation to reduce energy use. In the summer, the south-facing walls absorb UV rays that cool the building’s interior. The 2,000 square foot wall was created by Green Living Technologies.

There are two categories of green walls: green facades and living walls. Green walls are comprised of climbing plants growing directly on a wall or on specially designed structures. Living walls are composed of pre-vegetated panels or fabric systems that are attached to a frame or structural wall.

The concept of “vertical gardens” or “Le Mur Végétal” was invented by botanist Patrick Blanc. Click here to browse his amazing website with beautiful examples of vertical gardens. They are also known as biowalls.

Read more about Anthropologie’s “edgy and unexpected” store facades here.

Check out this article by architect Randy Sharp— “6 Things You Need to Know About Green Walls.”

Visit www.treehugger.com to see some really beautiful buildings wrapped in living walls.

Learn about maintenance of green walls at www.greenroofs.com

Gardener’s Supply Company sells outdoor living wall planters as well as indoor living wall panels. Click here to see more examples of living walls in their photo center.

I know what my next project is going to be!

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Michael Hellgren is a landscape architect who specializes in creating vertical gardens, resulting in an incredible way to incorporate nature in indoor spaces.  

Click below for more pics…  

During our short stop in Huntsville, Sue and Steve treated Michael and me to lunch at Westin Hotel’s Sage Grill (where I feasted on my first fried green tomato ever—now I know what the fuss is about!). Afterward, we browsed the shops at Bridge Street Town Centre, one of Huntsville’s newest shopping malls. I was immediately drawn to the “living walls” at the Anthropologie store. New York-based Elmslie Osler Architect designed the store as well as the living wall—the largest in North America. The installation is constructed with two foot by two foot panels that are three inches deep. The container trays were filled with growing medium and pre-planted with seeds from various sedums. The walls bloom in the spring and stay green throughout the milder winter months in Huntsville. They serve another purpose—extra insulation to reduce energy use. In the summer, the south-facing walls absorb UV rays that cool the building’s interior. The 2,000 square foot wall was created by Green Living Technologies.

There are two categories of green walls: green facades and living walls. Green walls are comprised of climbing plants growing directly on a wall or on specially designed structures. Living walls are composed of pre-vegetated panels or fabric systems that are attached to a frame or structural wall.

The concept of “vertical gardens” or “Le Mur Végétal” was invented by botanist Patrick Blanc. Click here to browse his amazing website with beautiful examples of vertical gardens. They are also known as biowalls.

Read more about Anthropologie’s “edgy and unexpected” store facades here.

Check out this article by architect Randy Sharp—”6 Things You Need to Know About Green Walls.”

Visit www.treehugger.com to see some really beautiful buildings wrapped in living walls.

Learn about maintenance of green walls at www.greenroofs.com

Gardener’s Supply Company sells outdoor living wall planters as well as indoor living wall panels. Click here to see more examples of living walls in their photo center.

I know what my next project is going to be!

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.