Achieving Sustainability

Taking this further requires the hardware system to allow for hosting processes that generate biological balance, thus mitigating against process or biological fatigue. Afterall, the hardware, whether that be a planter on a balcony, a vertical garden ascending the sides of a building, a roof garden, or suspended columns within the atrium void of a building, all these components for all their complexity are ultimately merely hosts for plants and their associated biological processes of growth and development.

Achieving reduced biological fatigue necessitates designing with nature to support its universal and relentless process of building up and breaking down (entropy and syntropy). Anything that stands in the way of gravity, erosion through wind, sun, warmth, cold or mechanical bombardment or the inevitable processes of biological decomposition, will require the ability to withstand such fatigue or to rebuild and regenerate, to persist.Commercially, this entails working with components and processes requiring minimal inputs to maintain. Nature achieves this through slowly, incrementally, ‘growing’ systems one piece at a time. 

Each incremental addition is tested by attrition with stresses and overloads generally leading to removal, ingestion and/or replacement with whatever the local environment supplies from allied developments, such as water, leaf litter, new seedlings or fauna emerging along organic tangents. Thus, the process relentlessly unfolds, with building block repeatedly adding to a falling away as the systems build and adapt to the pressures of the moment.

Fytogreen applies this core knowledge to focus upon generating living architecture planting solutions capable of adapting, reconfiguring and rejuvenating via natural and inherent processes of ecological unfolding. This is a particular approach to design. 

In terms of vertical gardens, this entails utilising species originating from specific epiphytic or lithophytic ecologies in habitat, where they have evolved particular adaptations to thrive on the vertical plane, rather than attempting to force terrestrial, landscape, species to persist on the vertical, a mode of live which is significantly separated from their genetic imperative gained through generations of living in horizontal soils. 

Using these species is certainly not sufficient to achieve sustainable, resilient and adaptive outcomes. We take this further by carefully researching their habitats and learning how and why each species is found there, the intricacies of each exposure, level of competition, limits of each environmental ‘fatigue or stress’ impact and what each species is doing within the mixed species community. Armed with such insights, we then apply each species based upon such observations, to generate pragmatic configurations to address each individual exposure type playing out over each host wall surface. 

For Roof Gardens, Planter Boxes, FytoArbours, Column Gardens, Floating Wetlands and terrestrial applications, the same ecological mode of analysis and design apply. Roof gardens require species with specific and general adaptations to survive in shallow substrate profiles, heightened wind and sun exposures, fluctuating moisture gradients, root zone thermal fluctuations, etc. 

We recognise the role of pioneer, secondary and tertiary colonising species. Support species, structural species and ephemeral species play roles within mixed species ecologies, spreading stress loadings across entire populations rather than loading such stressors onto isolated specimens or monocultures.  In many instances, such fatigue stress may only be recognisable via pest and disease influx, over time, misleading less experienced designers and horticulturists to assume the pests are merely naturally occurring anomalies rather than symptoms of an excessively stress-loaded design which is not sustainable or adaptive.