Climbing The Office Walls

Plants liven up a workplace: They clean the air, cheer cubicle dwellers and entice customers into cafés, stores and spas. But they take up floor space. The solution? Companies are going vertical by covering their retail and office walls with plants.

Interior plant walls first sprouted about three years ago. Firms that specialized in environmentally friendly plant-covered roofs discovered that plants could grow on ever-steeper inclines. Two key players, Green Living Technologies of Rochester, N.Y., and Elevated Landscape Technologies of Brantford, Ontario, have since installed hundreds of green walls. The trade group Green Roofs for Healthy Cities offers a training class for builders and designers who want to work with vertical plant installations.

The typical green wall costs between $60 and $125 per square foot to install. It comes with slow-growing, shallow-rooted plants that grow on a wall-mounted frame that contains a closed water system. A wall requires only spotlights or skylights, small amounts of plant food and a battery to run the water-filtration system, says Hans Andersson of Green Fortune, a Stockholm firm that has put them into clothing stores, auto dealerships and a concert hall. Typically, the firm that installs the wall provides care under a contract similar to any other office-plant maintenance contract. The best part of plant-covered walls: no paint job.

© 2008