[notes on a vertical garden]

There are vines creeping up buildings and then there are vertical gardens. I came across this hotel in the middle of Rome around the hip Piazza Navona neighborhood. Its lush, plush presence amid densely-packed, stone, and plastered neighboring buildings and streets sated my inner Anne of Green Gables. Wisteria and Japanese Creeper (Boston Ivy) are planted on the roof, giving air + sun to roots + dramatic license to trailing vines. Note the gorgeous contrast of texture and shape of the potted palms + the deeply-inset Venetian Red windows (complementary colors).

...

which leads me to MFO Park by Raderschall Landscape Architects at a housing project close to where I used to live in Zurich, Switzerland. Yes, vines creeping up a building, yet inventively. Here an open steel structure with conical steel cable columns uses carefully-selected vines to make interior spaces, a grove, and a vegetated structure: 

Photo: Stichting het Panorama

Photo: Raderschall 

Photo: Raderschall

Photo: Raderschall

Photo: Raderschall

Photo: Raderschall

 Raderschall's Vine Planting Strategy:

Raderschall architectural section of the building and a visitor's experience of the spaces:

 

...

And finally to the Caixa Forum next to the Prado Museum and across the street from the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid, Spain. While Herzog + de Meuron designed the building, Patrick Blanc--a vertical garden designer--designed the contrasting green wall. This project elevated the visibility of vertical gardens (aka: living walls, green walls) and they've been popping up in cities around the world. Two things you can't get from pictures: the smell + temperature of the space next to the wall. See design tips below for more info.

Photo: Patrick Blanc website

Photo: Patrick Blanc website

Installation Photo: Patrick Blanc website

Photo: Patrick Blanc website

Photo rjhuttondfw flickr

[design tips]

Vertical garden walls like Patrick Blanc's require an interlocking, waterproof, modular grid structure similar to those little plastic flats for plant starters or vertical columns with holes. Plant plugs are placed individually in each opening, increasingly without soil, and fed water + nutrients through an extensive internal irrigation system. 

TONS OF WATER required. In the absence of soil, they rely on potent mixes of fertilizers and compound nutrients, not making them a very environmentally-conscious design solution. While they are beautiful and do provide significant cooling properties to any building, beware "green-washing" lexicon around them. 

Vines, however, require less water (fewer plants) and have the capacity to grow in locations with less sun and available roof planting space. They also help to reduce the temperature of a building and its surrounding area. Vines work in a few ways: 

1. Twining (the entire vine twists around something)  

2. Tendrils (little arms shoot out from the stock to then twine)  

3. Adhesion (a disc with a natural chemical substance glues it to a surface)

Vines on buildings do require maintenance and must be systematically removed in order to not harm the structure on which they grow.