You might first associate vertical gardens with the DIY craze of Covid, but these green walls, or living walls have been around for thousands of years, and have become increasingly popular with the global green wall market projected to reach $2.7 billion by 2030. The most primitive vertical gardening started in ancient Rome and Greece with simple trellises of vines or grapes and developed into contemporary vertical gardening in the 1980s by Patrick Blanc, the father of the modern vertical garden. Today’s vertical garden has evolved into green architecture that is sustainable, solves the problem of limited horizontal space, and offers environmental benefits such as air purification, noise reduction and temperature regulation, all while being aesthetically pleasing.
Vertical gardens are particularly popular in Australia due to the combination of climate awareness, urban density and premium real estate prices. From small residential spaces to multi-storey indoor or outdoor areas, green walls are versatile, unique and striking. Australia is, in fact, at the forefront of cutting edge technology in green walls, due in part to people like Adam Cornish, the director and industrial designer of FoliaNetwork and Junglefy.
Junglefy is one of Australia’s leading living infrastructure specialists and the company behind some of the most eye-catching green walls in Sydney: One Central Park’s 1200m² of living walls, the cascading greenery at Barangaroo House, the rainforest effect of Waterfall by Crown Group, and the six-metre-high green breathing wall between two floors at Lendlease’s Sydney Headquarters. Key to these installations is the Junglefy Breathing Wall, designed by Adam, which uses a network of small, energy-efficient fans hidden in the foliage to move large volumes of air through the plants’ root system, accelerating the natural process of bio-filtration, and removing more pollutants from the air, faster.
When creating a living wall, Adam tries to replicate nature as closely as possible. “If I do my design properly, you don’t see it.” Key to the success of a green wall is picking the right plants (“never put a fern on a west facing wall,” Adam cautions more than once), light (plants only photosynthesise and purify the air when they receive adequate light) and irrigation (to ensure the absence of root rot or disease from overwatering).
Cornish believes in a “science and tech driven approach to nature” so developed the living wall system in a very controlled way. Having an agricultural/landscaping approach was hindering progress so he thought, “let’s treat this no differently from designing a piece of tech and use sensors, timers, valves and custom LED lights.” You might think all this technology is excessive for a garden on a wall, but it’s actually a cost effective and energy efficient way to reduce resources.
It doesn’t matter how small your space is, there are living walls perfect for home or apartment use, from indoor or outdoor planters (hanging or positioned on the side of a balcony or terrace) to breathing stands or small green walls in a garden. The residential space is in fact where Junglefy started, before expanding to commercial applications, and Adam still describes their work as “residential to green infrastructure to everything in between.”
Whether a small residential or large commercial living wall, you run into danger if you think you don’t need to maintain them. People forget, “It’s a garden, it needs maintenance,” Adam laments. “If you make a smart decision and back a good system you’ll have something that will last decades and can be serviced and replaced.” And all for a cost that is competitive to traditional landscaping.
For builders, homeowners and businesses, the positives don’t stop there. With various regulations requiring a certain amount of greenery in new builds and efforts being made to “greenify” cities, vertical walls offer an aesthetically-pleasing way to use previously underutilised space and avoid impacting the building’s footprint, all while enhancing asset value, reducing environmental impact and lowering operational costs with Green Star certification.
Vertical gardens have come a very long way from the simplicity of ancient times. With groundbreaking innovation at the heart of today’s living wall technology, these walls showcase Mother Nature at its very best.