As green as it gets

The other day I found a link in my inbox to a website on... grass?! The link was more specifically to a do-it-yourself grass clock developed on vertical garden concepts which immediately aroused my curiosity and launched an investigation of this new and to me unknown kind of 'green design'.

The clock was designed by J Yu from Yanko Design in glass and steel and contains its own home lawn or other small plants, a do-it-your-self grass clock. The grass is designed as a vibrant, natural air purifier that is constantly trimmed to a preset length by the sharp pointers, as the minutes slip away. And depending on how creative on the green area you are, you can - with consideration for the environment and the stomach – easily sow consumable plants as the cut-offs are collected in a special container. You water in the top and collect in the bottom - quite cleverly and aesthetically simple and beautiful. Only problem is to keep the plants alive and learn to decode the time, which the present writer still struggles with.

A whole world of vertical grass
The idea of an air-purifying grass wall is not unique though. Argentine Ustatic developed in 2006 'the ustatic wall grass concept', a green, air-purifying wall that is ready to be seamed directly on the wall in the apartment and created after the theory that living grass at home is beneficial. The idea is decoration or an alternative greening of small spaces without backyards. The artificially sown grass should have the same air purifying effect as all other living members of the green family.

In my attempt to understand the strange clock, I came past the site Lushe; a whole world of ‘vertical garden enthusiasts’. A bunch of enthusiasts who grow vertical gardens has created a website filled with tips and ideas for DIY-projects like a moss house, a grass mirror, a portable vertical garden, a guide to get grass to grow on the walls and even a vertical garden combined with a fish pond and tons of other green and vertical stuff.

Fast Company has also brought a small overview of a variety of proposals for green growths on the walls, and how not to do it. On the list you find among other the posh London hotel The Athaneum and their outdoor mosaic of living plants on the facade, albeit to a novice within the planted world does not differ much from the well-known and disliked architects consolation; Mosstikas something more creative use of façade plants as art and examples of how sad the result gets when you forget to water and maintain.

The dream of total design
These different proposals on the use of live material woven into the architecture and as a basis for the design draws on the ideology and the dream of a fusion of different materials, technologies and disciplines. By making the grass a crucial part of the clock function, Yu tries to soften the often so criticized glass and steel and make it come a live by combining disciplines such as innovation, technology and design in collaboration with the user.

Whether it works is another question. One can anticipate the scale of smaller products approached as a sort of modern Bonsai tree that has to be nursed daily. And here in the middle of the up until now wildest snowstorm of the winter, I would love to have something green on the wall to look at. But with the lack of green fingers and my ability to kill off everything green, it would be a doomed project to invite such a clock inside. And I dare not even to think about how many times I would be mistaken about the time.

Instead, I enjoy knowing that there is a whole world of grass out there and that we have a lot of vertically hanging garden enthusiasts to take care of it.