Designinc: Wall to fork

The vertical garden takes its inspiration from the farm to fork theory, which aims to make our eating greener, writes Nadine Botha

The "farm to fork" distance is the distance it takes for fresh produce to reach your plate. This distance is measured in "food miles" and is said to be responsible for 15% of global CO2 emissions. Consider the air-freighted Mexican avocados, Kenyan broccoli and British baby spinach that pervade SA supermarkets and that statistic comes closer to home.

A global movement to reduce food miles and green our urban environment is growing. Internationally, projects including Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray's hydroponic Window Farms for New York residents and Patrick Blanc's living walls in Paris are making headway. Taking a more activist tone, Fritz Haeg's Edible Estate project works to rehabilitate US domestic lawns into mini farms, while Amy Franceschini and her team of San Francisco Futurefarmers are reviving the Victory Gardens of World War Two, where city dwellers self-produced 48% of the US's food supply.

Cape Town-based Haldane Martin launched his home-grown solution at the recent Design Indaba Expo 2011. The Wallflower Vertical Garden is designed for city dwellers to make the most of their limited space and to get their fingers in on the green movement.

The result of four years' work, Martin's garden was inspired by the Seoul Commune 2026 conceptual project by Korean architecture firm Mass Studies. Taking the notion of towers in a park to the extreme by turning the building into the park itself, the Seoul Commune 2026 uses a honeycomb-like structure to create private, public and commercial spaces.

"I was inspired by this architectural vision for high density, sustainable living where we bring nature and farming back into the urban environment," says Martin.

Bringing such utopian futurism back to reality, Martin's garden uses a fractalised honeycomb pattern to allow three different-sized containers to scale a wall. Branched metal trellising supports the containers. Being modular, the system can be expanded or contracted according to the size of the wall. A water-efficient drip irrigation system is included, in which a nutrient delivery system can be integrated. The drainage holes in the containers are positioned to drip directly onto the plant below.

Both the honeycomb design and the irrigation system are inspired by systems that occur in nature - a design technique called biomimicry. The honeycomb design mimics the space and structural efficiency of beehives, while the irrigation system mimics the branching patterns employed by the water and nutrient distribution network of a plant leaf.

The three planters make a full vegetable garden possible, from carrots and root vegetables in the large planters to tomatoes and other fruits in the medium planters, and leafy vegetables in the small planters. Keeping it green, the containers are made out of recycled plastic and the mounting hardware from recycled stainless steel.

Martin would like to "see Wallflowers climbing up buildings all over the world". To achieve mass-market penetration, the next step is to launch into production, making large-scale distribution and affordable prices possible.

If this happens, South Africa could be the birthplace of the world's biggest, greenest honeycomb.

• Nadine Botha is the editor of Design Indaba magazine: www.designindaba.com