07/31/2014
There was an article about Permaculture and Vertecology in the last issue of The Bubble. Now there's a Kickstarter campaign for these chic, geometrical vertical gardens created by my friend Mark Lavin. Here's the link to the Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mark-scott-lavin/the-vertecology-hanging-garden-grow-food-beautiful?ref=nav_search
Read on for the official press release:
Short on Space and Long on Style? Vertecology invents a Hanging Garden to help people turn any space into an organic garden
EUGENE – Owner of Vertecology LLC., Mark Scott Lavin has created a unique and stylish eco-structure that lets green-minded town and city dwellers turn tight spaces into beautiful vertical gardens. Lavin is aiming to manufacture and bring the Vertecology Hanging Garden to homes in the community by raising $7,800 on Kickstarter by August 23rd.
Lavin was inspired to invent the Hanging Garden as a way to help busy people with limited time and space participate in permaculture, one of most promising eco-conscious movements coming to fore in recent years. A conflation of “permanent” and “culture,” permaculture is about mimicking, using, supporting, enhancing and guiding the patterns and relationships found in natural ecosystems to design agriculture, buildings, technology and potentially every aspect of human civilization.
Combining knotted rope and stiff platforms in a repeating pattern based on the octahedron, one of the strongest geometric forms in the universe, the Hanging Garden can hold over 200 pounds and withstand 50 mph winds, and thus can become as one client put it, “a vertical column of nature in your home.” Every Hanging Garden is produced locally and provides 1.3 square feet of planting, growing, soil-building and air-freshening space per level. The Hanging Garden can be installed wherever there are three overhead points capable of supporting its weight.
“This is about making the everyday extraordinary, and it’s about melding human genius with the genius of nature,” Lavin says. “Reaching our Kickstarter goal means we can bring a sense of natural wonder right into people’s living rooms through a form that’s both artistic and functional.”
Inspired by the triple bottom line (people, planet and profit) and his work with architecture, tree house building, living walls and water systems engineering, and by the design science of luminaries such as R Buckminster Fuller, Lavin founded Vertecology and soon afterward, built the first Hanging Garden prototypes in his shop, did the first private installations and showcased the design at locations such as Pranafest in Southern Oregon.
“Vertecology can help us make a major cultural transition in baby steps by helping us connect to each other and the natural world,” Lavin says. With the tagline ‘Design for the world that can be,’ Vertecology aims to use stylish design embodied in products like the Hanging Garden to inspire and empower people and communities to become active participants in shaping sustainable, joyful, expressive and deeply connected lifestyles – and an abundant future.
With products like the Hanging Garden, Lavin hopes to whet people’s appetites for what permaculture design can do. “Whether you’ve heard of permaculture or not, you may well find yourself among the growing number of us realizing that growing our own food frees us to make healthy, even inspiring choices for ourselves, our communities and the planet, that it gives us a much greater say over the future,” Lavin says. “We can create a net benefit to surrounding natural and human communities by recreating dynamic ecologies.”
With a successful Kickstarter, Vertecology will begin producing the Hanging Garden and developing additional versions of the product in the Willamette Valley this summer.
To support Vertecology’s Kickstarter campaign, visit and donate at kickstarter.com.
To find out more about the Hanging Garden works, or about Vertecology, please visit vertecology.com or email Mark Scott Lavin at [email protected].
Now you can transform any space into a vertical garden and grow food. Beautifully.
