sustainable gardens

Traditionally, the mash up of plants and buildings was an exercise in poetic symbolism. To wit: At the Princeton Ivy Club the mortared walls are well rooted for posterity–literally–with clinging ivy and the shelter of trees.

In the contemporary version, there's a new urgency: Faced not only with the necessity of making the most of our diminishing space and resources, how can we create more public greenspace as our potential undeveloped lands are disappearing?

Here are some ideas for making the most of our finite leftovers.

Besides visually expanding greenspace, plantings on building walls and roofs offer other advantages. Plants act as insulation against heat and cold, absorb rainwater, create wildlife habitat, and on a larger scale help lower urban temperatures and mitigate the heat island effect (a phenomenon of hardscaped cities creating more heat than the surrounding rural space). Plus, the ability of living plants to act as carbon storage batteries in an era of global climate change may be vital.

Interiors can be green integrated too.

The potential of green building is on display in this shop of Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester in the Gangham district of Seoul. The architect was Korean architect Minsuuk Cho of the firm Mass Studies. The building features include a planted façade and a moss-lined internal stairway. For a more detailed vision of the project, see here.

Photos by Yong-Kwan Kim

This building, the brainchild of Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, has been touted for its innovative integration of plants and architecture in a location especially known for its high temperatures, heavy rain, and sometimes day-long power shortages. The plants provide privacy while allowing for ventilation and natural daylighting.

More on this house here.

Below, more Vo Trong Nghia and his work in Viet Nam.

Here, Vo Trong's Wind and Water Bar: Not exactly a construction of living material but material that is only recently departed.

This planted façade is from a mixed-use building in Odawara, Japan.

And this, a banana plantation–or the modern urban equivalent–in the middle of Paris:

The urban forest in Tokyo: Quite possibly the future everywhere.

It's been called living sculpture, a giant stylized artichoke, the cousin to the aloe, new world native, and a vital component to both tequila and didgeridoos: The agave.

It thrives on neglect, needs no fertilizer, very little water, and can tolerate a variety of soils as long they're well drained. The perfect addition to the California garden.

Agave makes an excellent candidate for potting as it produces  sparse roots and tolerates crowding. It's also a good companion to the pool as it produces litter sparingly.

The agave's natural structure makes it an excellent sculptural accompaniment to soft grasses, wispy wildflowers, tufty salvias, and other fine-leafed gatherings. It not only provides the masculine element, it makes the feminine appear even more so.

It also makes for a striking emotional impact, its visual severity along with its spines and dagger-like projections can add drama to a any garden or country road.

Agaves are available in many color, sizes, and varieties including spineless.

Below, the sentries of the Sunnyland Gardens in Rancho Mirage, CA:

Beneath the pergola one agave stands like both king and jester at the terminus of this visual corridor: The general-in-arms and a floppy and spiky armed clown. If great gardens are like kaleidoscopic mixtures of beautiful contrasts then the agave, as one designer said, "is a great design opportunity."

Public outdoor space is dwindling. The age that brought us the great city parks may be well behind us. But the desire for shared green space remains. What to do?

Rather than hide in their backyards, some enterprising dreamers (disguised as designers and gardeners) have come to save us.

What they do is build green worlds where none existed before. Or sometimes they just better exploit what's already there.

One of the best recent examples of how this might work is High Line.

For decades Staten Island was a place infamous for its stink: Blame Fresh Kills, the world's largest landfill in their midst. Closed to dumping in 2001, plans are now underway to transform this erstwhile effluvium ejector into a lush green space three times the size of Central Park.

This, from Melbourne, Australia:

Macro urban and micro residential:

Barcelona, Spain:

New Orleans:

The size of the garden isn't nearly as important as where it is:

The famous dining plaza of the Hotel Plaza Athénée, Paris:

A concept for Spiral Garden which is to be a self-sufficient vertical public garden as well as a place where social interaction, native vegetation, and urban orchards may coexist. The plan is to build them in cities and run them as a kind of public co-op. More info here.

The proposed vertical Dochodo Island Zoo in Korea:

There's much more to this than merely aesthetics. We don't have to look hard to find more urgent incentives: According to United Nations estimates, 80% of the world's citizens will live in cities by 2050. Swedish architectural firm Plantagon has an idea: The vertical greenhouse.

The greenhouse is a regenerating food bank making food production less costly for consumers and the environment. It also attempts to counter urban sprawl with a self-sufficient alternative. Plantagon's CEO Hans Hassle says this:

Essentially, as urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide.

More on this here.

Not that aesthetics aren't reason enough.

As George Carlin said, it's not about saving the planet. The planet is fine. It's the people who're f**ked.

Nature will get it back in the end. We may as well give in to it now.

For plants, humans could be just another invasive species.

Michael Pollan argues that when it comes to choosing what goes in your garden the choice may be less yours and more the plants', Darwinianly speaking. It could be that unsuspecting humans are being duped by the corn, grass, and flowers no less than the have butterfly or the bumble bee.

We're outmatched: Humans don't even have as many genes as rice. At the very least, plants are smarter than we think. Sure, we humans have consciousness, we make tools and form societies, but plants have a powerful and ancient biochemistry that may have us outgunned.

The color, shape, texture, perfumes: Humans can no more resist this than the hummingbird can.

And so, the meadow: It may the best compromise between flora and two-legged fauna.

Making the case for a post-turf California is nothing new, but the chorus has been steadily swelling. (A few of the more vocal members we've featured here are John Greenlee, James Hitchmough, and Piet Oudolf.)

Among them are the authors of the newly published Reimagining the California Lawn (where some of these images were taken). The authors add yet another resource for suggestions on lawn alternatives both practical and edible. Another advocate, designer, educator, and anti-lawn and edible landscape activist Fritz Haeg, reminds us that there were no lawns in Eden either.

Despite a lawn's prodigious use of water (the average lawn gulps about 88 gallons a day) and demands of time and resources for care and maintenance, lawns are practically useless. According to a 2007 UCLA study, the use of our yards, back or front, as a locus for recreation is a fantasy. Both children and their parents are staying inside more. Lawns are a poor investment and, especially in Southern California, no longer sustainable.

From a design aspect, it's even possible to view lawns as a kind of yoke. When landscapes are liberated, a new variety of new possibilities appear: The meadow, the jungle, the desert, the productive garden, etc.

In case you missed this, the LA Times recently did a feature on a designer you may've heard of.

We'd also like to thank the Times for two other stories on Sean and Knibb Design from 2009: Sean Knibb's paint box; Landscape Designer Sean Knibb likes nature's ideas