Property News · July 31, 2022

Wonderwalls: how to make the most of leafy climbers


Ivy does a perfectly good job when it comes to covering bricks and fences, but there are more exciting optionsEver since I saw photos of the very first living walls in Paris in the early 2000s, I have been fascinated by their gravity-defying beauty. The brainchild of one of my horticultural heroes, botanist Patrick Blanc, they have this Inception-like ability to take open green space and fold it around entire buildings, clothing the concrete of the city in living green. Since then the ingenious concept has sprung up all over the world, from giant cantilevered “sky parks” in downtown Singapore, to modular domestic versions you can buy in any garden centre. As with most great innovations, a groundbreaking concept has spawned hundreds of replicas, as architects the world over mimic the idea. This usually means ditching the rare plant species of Blanc’s original creations, for fast-growing, low-maintenance options. More often than not this lack of horticultural ambition, or frankly competence, means that a single species now dominates many of the walls that have been popping up around me in London: ivy. Why would one spend thousands of pounds cladding a building in irrigated panels which can cost per metre more than Italian marble, only to stuff them full of a plant that would soon drape the structure of its own accord? Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Wonderwalls: how to make the most of leafy climbers

You may also like...