Living walls

I love living walls and South Bay Botanic Garden has one of the best living walls I’ve ever seen. Besides the interest of the plants, I liked the design, different from the usual squares.

Living walls are panels of plants, grown vertically – using hydroponics or substrate-based growing media – on structures that are either freestanding or attached to walls.  Greenroofguide.com

Greenroofguide.com talks about green roofs and DIY green roofs as well as livings walls and vertical gardens. The first photos are simple but scroll down on any of the pages to see more elaborate and beautiful examples.

When we lived in Cleveland, we had a flat roof on our garage where I grew tomatoes and some other vegetables to keep them safe from the depredations of animals such as evil chipmunks and deer. It didn’t really qualify as a green roof but any animal attempting to reach the veggies would have had to pole vault or be shot out of a cannon, in which case I would have gladly surrendered my veggies in exchange for a video or two to make my fortune. But seriously, explore the site and perhaps you’ll catch a bit of my excitement if these photos don’t do that.

Descanso Garden has a vertical wall, which is much higher and on the side of a building. This is part of it.

But living walls or vertical gardens don’t have to outdoors or elaborate. You can also do living walls indoors as The Spruce shows beautifully here and in a variety of types and sizes. Plants have been shown to improve mental health, purify the air, muffle background noise, lower stress and the various “walls” shown aren’t difficult to put together, so what’s not to like?

Or any of you familiar with any or all of these features? Do any of you have a vertical wall or something similar? Inquiring minds like mine want to know. 🙂

Green roof wanna-be

Green roof at Paris airport

Lately I’ve become interested in green roofs. Maybe it’s some quirk that runs in my family. My brother’s interested in straw bale houses and re-doing a barn to live in. I think, though, my interest stems from having a flat roof over our garage, something not an unalloyed blessing. For where there is a flat roof, there you will also find the distinct possibility that water will at some time and in its own inimitable fashion make (or at the very least, seek to make) its way into whatever lie below it.

The house of my heart

The house of my heart has:

• a library, where all my hundreds of books are on shelves so I can see them and easily access them without digging through boxes in the attic. The library has chairs that invite me to curl up and read, plenty of light (both artificial and natural), maybe even a window seat. It will probably have my laptop, a printer, etc…the technological minutia of today’s day-to-day living, a wonderful desk to store interesting pens, pencils and markers and gorgeous paper (plus stamps for things that still will be sent “regular” mail.)

• a porch. A big porch. A place with outdoor furniture where I can sit in the morning with my cup of tea, greet the day (or my neighbors or both), or listen to all the sounds that make up silence in the way that all colors make either white or black, depending if you add all colors of light (which will make white) or all colors of paint (which will make something approaching black.) A place where, if my house is near other people, I can see them, talk to them, invite them over, set food and drink out for them and get to know them.

• a clothesline. I want my clothes to smell like sunshine in the summer and my towels, sheets and pillowcases to invite noses into them. My dryer will appreciate the break. Not convinced of the fun of hanging things out in winter and breaking ice off them, though.

• large windows, suitably insulated, easy to open to welcome in the scents of summer, beautifully framed indoors by some sort of “window treatments” and on the outside, by real shutters that I can reach out and close at night, French-style. Provencal colors would be lovely for them. The sun will pour into the house on sunny days, into every room, nook and cranny.

• a large kitchen that’s the heart of the home, maybe a kitchen-dining room. Either way, I’ll be able to look outside while eating, gazing at the garden, trees, fruit trees and flowers. In the yard of my heart, there will be flowers to bring inside and food to eat. There might be chickens, both for eggs and for their ecological effect. There will also be a kitchen garden outside the patio doors, a patio with a grill, pots filled with herbs, chairs around a table, protected, when needed, by an umbrella.

• ceiling fans in all the rooms, solar panels, skylights, and a solarium as well as a green house. There’s a wood-burning stove that heats much of, or all of, the house. The gutters end in rain barrels and the garden has a drip system. In one corner, you’ll find the compost pile.

• green roofs. Or maybe not, since after having a flat roof with water problems for a time, I swore our next house would have roofs so steep the crampons would be needed to work on them. But green roofs intrigue me as do straw bale homes, adobe homes and homes built partly into a hill.

• if not a basement and attic, then plenty of storage space. A pantry and/or a cellar.

• a dog, probably a rescue pit bull, to act as official welcome-er.

Whatever it has, the house of my heart will be filled with love, friendship, a sense of peace and community, good food, two or three-hour meals with friends and family and the love of God. The house of my heart will be a home as well.

(Thank you for permission to use the lovely photo [on the right] of a Provencal home to Barbara van Zanten-Stolarski  of Europa Photogenica, unique photo tours to unusual places, at www.europaphotogenica.com.)