One for the wall: Puneites take to vertical gardening

Vertical gardens came into being to use the limited space available, especially in urban settings, where the block sizes are shrinking and there is a shift to apartment living.

In vertical gardens, plants are grown upwards using support of concrete walls. These are the living walls which are planted with vegetation, like grass, herbs or even vegetables, like cherry tomatoes or chillies. These green walls can be installed indoor or outdoor.

Santosh Gaikwad, a landscape artist and nursery owner, shares that vertical gardens are an ideal choice for those who have a green thumb but lack of space holds them back.

He said, “A vertical garden helps with energy efficiency as it helps with the thermal insulation of a building and creates wind protection during winter months and limits movement of heat through thick vegetation mass.”

The other pros of a vertical garden include noise reduction as the plants growing inside the living wall system will contribute to an overall reduction of noise that transmits or reflects from the wall. Sujit Jain, founder, GRIIN, a company that offers pertinent solutions to create sustainable living walls shared, “The indoor plants are not only decorative, but NASA scientists have found few varieties of those plants to be surprisingly useful in absorbing potentially harmful gases and cleaning the air inside modern buildings. Be it an interior or an exterior part of a structure, a vertical garden transforms the entire area into a stunning visual treat.”

The maintenance of a vertical garden could be an issue as watering in a vertical living system can be little difficult and messy at times. Jain added, “Also fertigation and nutrient management is comparatively inconvenient. However, this can be handled with the help of experts. A traditional vertical garden requires constant (daily) and costly maintenance. Considering this challenge, we came up with green wall solution that is full of convenience. First of all, its highly-skilled team with technical backgrounds of agriculture, horticulture and interior designers, design custom-built living walls for every project and also helps the client in choosing the best suited plants for the site and in case there are concerns, such as light intensity, direction of site, ventilation, etc., then the team addresses them with the help of artificial solutions.”