Kevin Songer at Avid Group introduced me to this incredible concept. Living walls, vertical gardens, vegetative roofs... All support a sustainable lifestyle. Regarding indoor air quality, vertical gardens greatly improve the air you breathe and enhances the beauty of otherwise stark, commercial interiors.For examples of some beautifully done vertical gardens, visit Patrick Blanc's website and click through to "Walls" for a detailed slide show of his work.
Studies have shown that people are happier when they have a connection to nature, whether or not it's a window allowing an outside view, or the cubicle farm with a plant in every cube. Humans thrive on that connection.
Along with that, any school kid can tell you that plants feed oxygen back into the atmosphere, while we feed carbon dioxide back. It's that circle of life thing. We also know that a number of plants actually clean the air, removing harmful off-gassing from formaldehyes and other VOC's.
Now, imagine a living garden in your office. Or in your hospital. Imagine the walls thriving with life. Imagine balconies with drought-resistant succulents of varying shades of greens, reds, oranges, browns. Imagine our downtown buildings sprinkled with vegetation on the roofs to combat heat island effects and reduce carbon footprints... and on walls to aesthetically enhance the structure and pump oxygen back into the air.
There's a lot we can learn about living walls and vegetative roofs, and I know there's a number of questions in need of answering (Won't it die? Doesn't it take a lot of irrigation? Won't it be riddled with bugs?). Valid questions... but questions with positive answers.
Let's get a conversation started, as I know our experts will chime in.
