what the hell? somebody's covered this London building with plants!
Amazing! Somebody had covered a whole builing in central London with plants. Asti had heard about this practice: Patrick Blanc, a French botanist, is exploring covering buildings in cities with plants. This practice he aptly named vertical gardening (in French: 'mur vegetal', the plant wall). The building in question was the Athaeneum Hotel in Mayfair, London. Below is another picture from my old mobile (apologies for the poor quality) and the hotel's website has some clearer day time shots.
a vertical garden really stands out in the London skyline (even at night!)
I think this is a very interesting idea in the context of fixing some carbon emissions using plants. I don't know how much growing area could be achieved, but this could be significant. For example, the Merchandise Mart in Chicago has a surface area A = 380 000 square meters. Suppose we can cover a whole such skyscraper a moss able to fix Q = 1/100000 grams of CO2 per square meter per day (I made this number up as I don't know the actual rate), on average. The we can fix C = QA = 3.8 grams of CO2 per day.
People are also speculating about 'coating buildings with algae'. I'm not sure how this could be more useful than covering them with plants when it comes to sinking CO2. And as somebody that works with algae I suspect covering buildings with algae is going to be a lot harder, if it makes sense at all. Algae might be better contained in building materials such as rooftiles, but this I will relegate to a future post!
