Some years ago, our species climbed out of the trees and retreated into caves. Personally, I've never gotten over it. I miss living with plants.

Maybe it's a sign that I'm disconnected from the landscape, but I'd love to live in a house covered with plants. A house like that would help me feel part of the natural world, rather than part of technology. After all, the city is technology - it's all about human-built systems, functioning at peak efficiency to replicate those functions formerly performed by the natural world. Don't get me wrong, I'm no luddite. I like technology. But it's not what I'm all about. I'm about leaf litter, and worms, and tomatoes, and all that good stuff.


Photo by Kıvanç, shared via Flickr

I'm not alone in my desire to live among plants. Many people want ivy to grow on their homes. And not just on houses. There's something about plant-covered walls that make large buildings seem inviting, approachable. Architects call this "bringing down the scale of a building." City planners respond to this need by requiring trellises on some buildings, especially on multifamily residences (huge blocks of apartment buildings). Builders respond grudgingly. Check out the pitiful cupful of dirt at the base of the trellis at left. I feel sorry for that plant.


Photo by City of Lynnwood.

When it comes to respecting plants, architects usually don't do much better than builders. They often draw elaborate trellises on their drawings. Then they'll draw some generic plants on their drawings and refer to them disparagingly as "growy things." The plants are an afterthought. Like on the beautiful trellis below: How would a plant even get up there?


Sometimes this is just self-deprecating humor, a nod to the more specialized field of landscape architecture. But it's also a response to the dire warnings of structural engineers, bricklayers, and all kinds of other contractors: Plants destroy houses. Ivy, for example, has little feet that pulls the weatherproof outer surface off walls, exposing the wall's vulnerable interior.


Photo by moplants.com


Photo by Christian Herman, St. Louis Brick

Other plants can damage buildings in other ways Wisteria pulls structures apart. Hedges trap moisture near wood walls, causing them to rot. Roots and vines will seek out a crack, then pry it open as the plant grows. Even my favorite little mountain flower, the saxifrage, comes from the latin meaning "rock breaker."


Saxifrage photo by Brewbooks, shared via Flickr

But some innovative designers are trying to break down that barrier between garden and home. They're using new techniques that allow plants to grow directly on walls, where a highly engineered layer of construction materials protects the wall itself from the plants. Below, the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, France.


Photo by Markhillary, shared via Flickr

Below, the Millenium Village, U.K.


Photo by Thingermejig, shared via Flickr

In other projects, the plants are held away from the building on a stand-alone metal screen. Below, the Capitol Hill Library in Seattle hopes to be completely covered in vines some day. There are several inches of air circulating between the plants and the brick wall.


Photo by Johnston Architects, Seattle

In some places, you can do it without the building. Check out the "living wall" in the photo below. I don't know how these plants get the minerals they'd normally attain from the soil. But it sure looks cool:


Photo by Thingermejig, shared via Flickr

Growing plants on the roof also helps reduce stormwater runoff and cool down overheated cities. Works equally well on big stores and little garages.


Photo by Mountain Equipment Co-op, Toronto store, shared via Wikipedia


Seattle Architect Rob Harrison's garage

I remember reading an essay by E.B. White from his collection, One Man's Meat. He had recently retired to a small Florida town near the Everglades. He described how, down there, plants thrived in every crack in the sidewalk, consumed buildings on the edge of town. In short, nature would consume this village in a heartbeat. The moment the citizenry put down their machetes, they'd be buried in greenery.


Photo by Eric I. E., shared via Flickr

There's a the old frontiersman's fear of wilderness in that observation. But I think White also admired that wilderness for its tenacity, its fecundity. Personally, I find nature's resiliency comforting. And I don't see any reason to wait for civilization to collapse before we can bring nature into our cities. Really, nature can be quite a polite houseguest. It requires so little of us. Just a crack in the wall.


Photo by Tim Parkinson, shared via Flickr

After following green roof and living wall designs for years, I got a kick out of a recent article in the Seattle Times. Perhaps this is the next frontier:


Photo by Chris Butler, Idaho Statesman

ZRecs.com cover photo by Geishaboy500, shared via Flickr.

Seattle's parks program has been demolishing a lot of houses lately. Each time it purchases land for a new "pocket park," there's a house that needs to come down. And increasingly, people are choosing to leave portions of the existing foundations to help define public spaces in the park's gardens.


In the park pictured above, most of the foundation had to be demolished. Then the contractors recreated portions of the foundation wall to create a sense of space in the center of the park. As I stand in the middle of this park, I can't help but feel I'm playing house. I imagine the kitchen, the bedrooms, check out the view from the back porch. I feel a little sad for the people who lived here before. Did they want to leave? Were they forced into a smaller house, or into the suburbs? But the walls also make me feel happy. There's a spectacular view from this park, and through someone's selflessness, this private property became democratized, became the property of the everyone. It's not easy to build parks in the city. Something has to die. It's only right to honor this house by celebrating its foundations.

At Gasworks Park, a large concrete wall contains a field. There used to be a big pile of dirt inside these walls, many stories high. Before that, I can't remember what it was, something vaguely industrial, I think. The Parks department sawcut portions of the wall, allowing this aquisition to bleed into the existing Gaswork's park. They left enough of the wall to create a sense of space. Inside, they sculpted the earth into interesting berms, shaped earthen hills designed to contain stormwater runoff. Depending on where you stand on a berm, you either feel contained the walls, or you can look out over them.


There are lots of ways to end the wall too. You can sawcut it, for a crisp entrance. Or, you can break it down in a landscape bed.


These projects show how an existing wall can contribute a sense of space to gardens and parks.

So I'm giddy with excitement about a new property recently aquired by the city. There are a couple of houses on the property, and a network of existing concrete walls. These are no ordinary foundation walls though. They seem to be the remains of a long-gone full-height garage. But absent their roof, they create a series of outdoor rooms with a quality unlike that of any other park I've seen. Consider this outdoor room: It has the bones of a courtyard in an old Italian Piazza. It just needs a little love. I love the windows, no headers, open to the sky. Aren't these walls just itching to be covered with golden hops, or bright red collegiate ivy?


Check out the old driveway. A small grove of trees grows in the middle of it. I love the idea of planting a grove of trees right in the middle of the entrance path. It says: You are entering the domain of the natural world. It speaks of a post-apocalyptic eden.


I saw a similar gesture in Fremont Peak Park. You have to walk around the trees. Check out what it looks like in a finished park:


But what I love best about this property is the story it tells. The family that owned these houses asserted itself on the land, spelled out its name on a hillside, sliced itself into strange, narrow and diagonal spaces with bold rows of trees. It's like a miniature Versailles built by hippy children of a senile timber magnate, a blank checkbook hanging from his limp hand. The only thing by his deathbed is a coffee table book on Picasso - the children memorized it without the guidance of art counselors. In their naivete, they created our little neighborhood Xanadu.






Just to leave this family's footprint in the final design would make this park a magical place.

After an inexcusable three-year hiatus, we are finally composting our kitchen waste again. We are both utterly ashamed that it took us three years in this house to get around to this. Now that it's done, I'm sure we'll both sleep a little better.

The photo shows our new setup. In the background, courtesy of junk pallets from the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore, is a yard waste composter. It's not very scientific, nor is it likely to produce high-quality compost, but it gives me a place to throw the big stuff, where it can slowly rot and decay as it sees fit. Best of all, the total cost for this wonderfully large bin was about $2 worth of three-inch decking screws. No, the corners are not square, but it's sturdy enough that I can jump in and out of it without having it collapse (please don't ask why I do this).

In the foreground is the compost bin I selected after an arduous and perilous journey through a maze of Websites offering compost bins for sale. I happen to live in a community where compost bins sell so slowly that none of the garden centers bother to stock them, so online was my only option. I say arduous, because there must be as many opinions about composters as there are compost bins in this great nation of ours. Let me add one more voice to the mix.

Rather than endorse some particular product - although the one I picked was a deliberate choice because it looked just like the one I got for free from a friend in Connecticut, and that was a great bin even though I broke the lid - I thought I'd summarize my travails and narrow down the options. If you want to buy a compost bin, as opposed to building your own--noble but not for all of us--or using heaps or other methods, the choices really boil down to four basic types.

• A square plastic bin with hinged lid, with sides that snap together. These typically have the little doors at the bottom to remove the finished compost. The key attribute here is it snaps together.


• A square plastic bin with sit-on-top lid, with sides that bolt together with nylon fasteners. These also have the little doors and come in sizes similar to the first type.


• Tumblers galore, which promise to produce lovely results in a few weeks. I had one of these once, hated it with a passion, and will never use one again. If you've had luck with one, please tell me what I did wrong.


• A catch-all category that I'll call the oddballs. Some of these are circular, and look like they've been cut out of massive plastic sewer pipes (example). Let's just say if it's not dark plastic and square or a tumbler, it goes in this group.

I was nearly enchanted by the round plastic bins in the last category, until my wife, ever the vigilant one, asked me how you get the compost out of the bottom with no door. Well, duh, should have noticed that. I'm also curious what kind of plastic goes into that pipe. The square bins are nearly all #2 plastic (high density polyethylene), which is generally considered harmless. It's also one of the commonly recycled plastics, so I was happy to see that the bin I purchased was 50% post-consumer waste.

I've already made my feelings about tumblers clear, but even were I not so strident, one should note that they like to be loaded and left alone, not constantly added to, which is hard when you're handling kitchen waste. Perhaps they work with other materials, but I've sworn them off. So it came down to the two square kinds. After reading hundreds of purchaser comments, I came to the conclusion that the snap together kind pops apart easily if you get in there with your pitchfork to turn your compost. Turning compost with my pitchfork is one of life's small pleasures, so that was a make-or-break attribute for me. Besides, with the screw-together kind, even if the chintzy nylon bolts fail, they can be easily replaced with galvanized steel. If the holes tear out, you can drill new ones.

OK, I said no endorsement, but I did buy this one. Really, though, it's just a plastic box, so decide which of the four types is best for your needs and composting style, find the cheapest source (try locally), and start composting.

If you're interested in making your own compost bin, try this simple (and cheap!) Storey pamphlet, or read Joshua's guide to building a compost bin, in the Gardenaut archives.