Popular living walls bring gardens, happiness inside
AKRON — At Goodyear’s global headquarters, the walls are alive.
Well, two of them are, anyway. They’re living walls, vertical arrays of plants that serve as art while bringing the outside in.
“It has a little bit of a wow factor,” Marty Ganzer, the company’s director of facilities, said of the two walls that decorate the atrium of the environmentally sustainable building in Akron. “Everybody has to touch it and feel it, because nobody believes it’s real.”
With their sculptural quality and element of surprise, living walls make a powerful design statement. Keri Algar believes they are catching on as interior decorations because people are hungry to reconnect with nature.
“Busy lives, stress, no time — these are all things that are eased when tending a garden,” even a garden that hangs on a wall, said Algar, author of the book “DIY Vertical Gardens.”
While living walls can be as simple as an arrangement of plant containers hung on a vertical surface, they usually involve some sort of structure that covers a large area.
Elaborate living walls like Goodyear’s are typically installed and maintained by professionals, with automated drip watering systems to simplify maintenance.
But do-it-yourselfers can create green walls using commercial products such as wall-hung growing pockets or by creating them from gutters or other containers.
Akron gardener Cindy Lorenz has made small versions of living walls, which are essentially shadowboxes.
She lines a shallow, framed wood box with waterproof landscape fabric, fills it with growing medium and covers the opening with chicken wire to hold the medium in place and provide spaces to stick in plants such as succulents and ferns. When the plants need watering, the whole thing is taken off the wall.
Lorenz said she started making the wall gardens to bring plants into her home in winter and provide a sense of calm while her husband was struggling with health problems.
“It’s been a spiritual thing for me more than anything,” she said.
At Goodyear, Ganzer said one of the plant varieties in the living walls — maidenhair fern — had to be replaced. It required so much water that the roots of the other plants were rotting.
Finding plants with similar water and light requirements is one of the challenges of creating a living wall.
Success requires careful planning, Algar says in her book. Plants need to be shallowrooted and matched to the light and temperature conditions of the space. Consideration must be given to how fast they’ll grow and how much water they’ll need. And the wall has to be waterproofed and able to bear the weight of the garden, which can be heavy when newly watered.
But Algar says the work is worth it.
“Put simply, plants make people happy,” she said.