JUST PEEL AND REVEAL
I moved into my first parent free house when I was 18. It was a small 2 bedroomed terrace and hadn’t been modified since the early 1950’s. Details like multicoured carpets, a pink bathroom suite and dark brown vinyl wallpaper didn’t bother me much as I had more interesting issues to deal with like working and going out on the town.
There were two things I did in the house to brighten things up a bit. The first was to peel off the 25 year old wallpaper in the front room. It came off really easily and underneath there was some more brown paper from the 1940’s. It looked good to me, so that stayed on the walls for another four years until I moved out. The other improvement I made was to add houseplants. I had more than 50 different types around the house and sprayed them all regularly, which is probably the main reason the house also needed a damp course putting in.
FERNS
I particularly liked the ferns in the bathroom and had them hanging everywhere. They all enjoyed the shaded light and humidity that someone who had at least one bath a week could offer. I tried to get as many different types in there as I could without the pots slipping into the bath when I was having a soak and covering me with soil.
Here are a few you will find in the shops. They can all grow quite large in the wild, but will keep to a manageable size in a pot.
Boston Fern
Boston ferns (Nephrolepis exaltata) are long-lived plants and the most popular for the bathroom. They can live for years with little attention.
Lemon Button Fern
Lemon button fern (Nephrolepis cordifolia) produces cute, golden-green fronds with rounded edges (that give them their button like appearance). It's an easy-to-grow fern that fits in well with a lot of decorating styles.
Maidenhair Fern
Among the most loved ferns, maidenhairs (Adiantum raddianum) offer fine-textured fronds on black stalks. The arching fronds emerge light green and darken a bit as they age.
Rabbit's-Foot Fern
(Humata tyermanii) This slow-growing fern offers dark green, fine textured fronds and fuzzy stems that creep down over the pot or along the soil. These stems are what give the fern its delightful common name.
Staghorn Fern
(Platycerium bifurcatum) Among the most spectacular of ferns, staghorns don't need to be grown in soil so you often see them mounted and grown on walls or posts.
Bird's Nest Fern
I found my plant in the road when I was coming home from work one day. It had been run over a few times but soon picked up in my fern sanctuary. It’s another favourite ofthe bathroom and mine lasted years. Bird’s nest fern (Asplenium nidus) is a slow-growing plant with bright green fronds that radiate from the centre of the plant, creating a vase or bird's nest shape.
Silver Brake Fern
(Pteris cretica)The crested fronds are almost spidery and bear a bright silvery stripe down the centre.
Kangaroo Paw Fern
(Microsorium diversifolium) This interesting fern offers shiny, dark green fronds in an unkempt mound reminiscent of Medusa's hair. Like rabbit's-foot fern, it bears creeping stems that may grow down the side of its container.
FRESH AIR TOO
Plants are just the thing to brighten the house up and freshen air. Check out the more common ones you can get locally, from the Peace Lily, Philodendrons, Dracaena varieties, Spider Plants, English Ivy, Ficus varieties, Bamboo, Aloe and Umbrella plants. They all filter impurities. My house must have had the cleanest air in the street.
There are big steps in architecture to bring greenery into heavily built up areas for this reason, not only into buildings, but on the outside of them too. The new ideas have been coined Vegitecture.
VEGITECTURE
Vegitecture or Vegetated Architecture is the use of organic materials such as plants as an element in construction. If done well it is an environmentally friendly way to add life to a city or heavily built up area. The Council Offices in Letterkenny made steps towards Vegitecture with their fabulous sedum roof, but it can go beyond that with more elaborate designs.
The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris has an 8,600 square foot vertical garden featuring more than 170 different plant species. The walls use a combination of sunshades, solar panels, and ventilation to catch water, making them self-sustaining ecosystems. The benefits aren’t just aesthetic; the walls reduce noise and provide natural cooling for the surrounding buildings because they soak up noise and heat, whereas concrete just reflects these.
The Irish weather is ideal to have these designs on buildings as we wouldn’t have to water them much, in fact rainwater can be harvested and stored and the correct plants will purify the air. There is also talk of a “vertical farm” where tenants of tall buildings grow their own fruit and vegetables on the walls and roofs. Looking at the images of proposed buildings and cities that will incorporate these ideas, they do remind me a bit of my old living room, except it would be outside, which would give the tenant more room to move around indoors.
NOT NEW
The idea isn’t new though. I used to deliver papers to a wooden house with a grass roof, which always used to amaze me, especially when they put the goat up there to keep the grass down. The living architecture idea goes back even further than my paper round in the 1970’s. There’s a well known Irish building that blends into the countryside perfectly. It was built at a time when there was only stone, mud and grass and is 600 years older than the pyramids. It’s Newgrange in the Boyne Valley with it’s grass roof, built in 3200BC and it hasn’t moved an inch since….I think we’ll see more on Vegitecture over the coming years, lack of space will soon be no excuse for not growing your own food.
