Make Your Walls Breathe Green

Green walls, are also popularly known as living walls or vertical gardens. These are an interesting way of bringing the greens to your home if there is a space constraint and you can't have a garden or place too many indoor plants in your home. Simply cover your walls, which contain soil, with plants and greens.

A 1938-patent held by Stanley Hart White, the living green walls were first invented by French botanist Patrick Blanc over three decades ago.

MakaanIQ shares more about these bio walls and how these can be used in your home:

Features 

• These walls can be positioned on the interior or exterior walls of your home. But these are different from the vining plants, which we usually plant outside our home to have a look of a cover up. In living walls the plants on the walls get nutrients and water from inside the vertical support.

• The green walls should be assembled while the construction of house is still going on. So while your dream house is still under process give it a review again to place your own living walls.

• These walls are basically panels of plants, which grown upright on a vertical structure attached to the walls.

• There are different types of growth medium like loose, mat, and structural. Loose-soil system and mat system are more popular for interior while structural can be seen more on the outside of a building.

• All the different types and techniques need high maintenance and should be replaced once or may be twice a year.

• Vertical gardens improve air quality in urban areas by purifying the air to a certain level.

• Green walls should be fixed in the areas where there is adequate amount of natural light.  

• Living green walls were initially opted for indoors of commercial buildings where maintenance was not an issue. But as the time passed people started building it on the exterior walls too, looking at the advantages it offered. Thus, displaying the magic of vertical gardens.

Installation techniques

There are three broad techniques using which you could create a living wall at your home. These include:

• Loose-soil: In this system a basket, a container or a group of small pockets can be filled with soil and then planted. Followed by hanging them onto the wall. The soil in this technique needs to be changed every two years. This kind of technique is not meant for areas with seismic activity and should not be used on walls over eight-feet high. Stormy rainfall or heavy winds can blow way this technique every easily.

• Mat: This technique is covered with layers of either felt mats or coir fibre and then planted. This technique can be built on walls up to 10-feet high and can be made in thin multiple layers. It also supports the root system of mature plants for upto five years. It can be placed in areas with low seismic activity and is apt for interiors of a building or a house.

• Structural: This technique is made up of various sectional blocks that can be piled up on walls with a height of 15 feet or higher. This technique can last up to 15 years and is best-suited for large office spaces and outdoor walls. This is the most expensive technique for vertical gardens.

Plants you could use

Following are the top 10 plants that are a perfect fit for a vertical garden:

• Lipstick plant
• Limelight bower wattle
• Golden pothos
• Dracaena
• Croton
• Maidenhair fern
• Sword fern
• Dragon plant
• Peace lily
• Philodendron

Watering the walls

Most of the vertical gardens cannot sustain without irrigation. The green walls are mostly designed with a dip-irrigation method to minimise water wastage. Recirculation method can also be very effective. It is a continuous method of reusing the water from the bottom to top through pumping. Once the tank is empty it can be refilled again.

But due to space constraints dip-irrigation is the popular method to avoid keeping tanks.