Green Walls

What’s with the fad for plant walls? I’ve been struggling with one for months now. You can get to about ninety percent success, but the ten percent that’s dying spoils everything. After talking to experts and looking at plant walls all over town, I’ve concluded that ninety percent success is about as good as you can hope for. The bottom line is that they don’t bear close scrutiny. If you want a plant wall, just make sure it’s on the other side of the room.

The plants grow on mats of soilless medium clipped to a frame. They are watered by a drip irrigation system with emitters on eight inch centers. The installation is expensive and the ongoing maintenance really adds up. You could buy art and have fantastic cut flowers, delivered twice a week, for less.

And, honestly, I don’t get the appeal. I’m just guessing, but I think people are turned on by the displacement. A bed of pachysandra goes unnoticed on the ground, but once you start carpeting walls and ceilings with it, as they did at this Ann Demeulemeester boutique in Seoul, you are suddenly on trend. “Luxury meets Green$$$,” the headline reads. Maybe not so much as it starts dying out in patches.

I really start to lose it when buildings like this are described as “green.” Yes, there are lots of plants, but they are sustained by life support systems that needlessly consume resources. The goals of green building are simple: to diminish the human footprint on the planet by using fewer and more sustainable resources. These goals are not met by creating illusions; they are met by making a lot of modest, responsible, daily choices that add up to a kind of ethics. Inflate your tires, carpool, use more efficient light bulbs and turn them off when you leave the room. And design buildings that make those kind of choices attractive.

This is not to say that greening needs to be boring or frumpy or uninnovative. What it does need to be is effective. If the numbers don't add up, it ain't green. You can't get there by posing and making reference to attractive trends.

The fantastical "green" shown here is just BS:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/23/fantastic-and-visionary-d_n_145848.html

And the sooner we can decouple escapist fantasies from green thinking, the sooner we can make progress with it.

Killing Frost

Tell me why I’m elated.
I pour my heart into the garden, but there’s a thrill when it’s laid waste. A chance to see things change overnight, then to start over…. I don’t know.
And it interesting to see the plants that are very tender (impatiens, coleus, cuphea, ipomoea) winnowed from the plants that can take a couple degrees of frost (abuliton, callibrachoa, lantana).

Salvia leucantha

This is my favorite tender sage. Nice, fuzzy grey leaves, shaped like willow leaves, on plants that gradually gain stature as the summer goes on. Not a gorgeous plant, but presentable, which is more than you can say for most of its cousins. By October it's grown to a substantial little shrub and every twig extends an arching raceme of fuzzy purple bracts. On some plants the petals that project from the bracts are violet, on others white. The arc of the flower stems reminds me of bleeding heart, another plant I love.

This sage is hardy in California, but the plants are unwieldy after a couple years. They are best in their first fall, so it's to our advantage that we have to replant every spring.

Full sun and lean living are best. It can get sloppy with too much shade and nourishment.

tender succulents

I'm making a mental note for next spring: plant sunny window boxes with tender succulents. This collection of Crassula, Echevaria, Aeoium and Sedum will stand a couple degrees of frost, but won't make it through the winter. On the other hand, it will thrive without daily watering in the summer.

To Autumn

to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

High Point 3

Here's another dreamboat from my trip. Once a fire station and now a beauty shop.

High Point 2

I may never want to live in a house that looks like Mount Vernon, but I love the way this front lawn runs right up to the portico without any transition in the way of terracing or foundation planting.
This is incredibly hard to pull off. It works because the architecture is so good, and the relationship of the building to the ground plane is completely resolved.
Capability Brown loved this effect. I’ve also noticed it in paintings by Stubbs. Both artists are about contemporary with the original Mount Vernon, so the minimalism that looks current today is also a period look from the middle decades of the 18th century.

High Point

I was recently in High Point, North Carolina and saw a house with an interesting front yard. The house was set back from the street, and a little valley ran across the yard. It was wooded, but the trees were thinned and limbed up enough to grow lawn beneath. A pattern of serpentine grass paths ran between beds of dark ivy, and patches of sun showed through the green.