GREEN WALL AT COOPER'S @ IFC5

The creation of a “Green wall” at our IFC café came about, like many things in life by accident.

As a result of the building of our toilet facilities within the café we were left with a very large blank wall facing the entrance of the café. It created a bit of a puzzle as we had already used one wall for “story telling” around heritage items and places visited. Another wall was used to display the coffee sacks that described the coffee origins we used. So what might go on this almighty wall.

We had a meeting with a local artist thinking that we might draw up a map of the world to describe the coffee journey from where it is grown to destination putting Jersey at the centre of the map however it felt a bit contrived and like a lot of large murals a bit static. Great in the short term but potentially losing its originality as time went by.

Serendipitously a friend of a friend introduced us to a very small UK based business who had just started building green walls in an easy to construct modular format. We just had to install a watering device at the top of the wall and the rest was supposed to be straightforward.

Well, anyone who has ever installed a green wall, particularly indoors will know it’s one thing to build the framework, it’s another to make sure it looks great. We had a recommended list of plants and approached a local garden centre. Said plants appeared and we spent a week-end placing them in our 3 metre by 3 metre wall. It looked great but it required some imagination as the individual plants were quite small and we anticipated them to fill out the gaps.

Another feature is appropriate lighting to “feed” the plants. Again another lesson in the types of lights required for a large green wall. We later discovered they were completely underspecced!

At last we were up and running and reminded ourselves why we had gone to such great effort. Green walls are great for “cleaning the air”, they bring a sense of calm and wellbeing and they are constantly changing. The concept is fantastic.

However it is a huge challenge maintaining a green wall. On one occasion we put some additional fertilizer on the wall to boost the plants only to kill everything in sight! We’ve overwatered the plants, we’ve underwatered the plants. Some plants hate being in a green wall, some love it. So over a period of 3 years we must have replaced every plant two or three times. It wasn’t easy to maintain this spectacular feature, it needed we discovered a lot of TLC.

Thankfully we had started a conversation with St. Helier parks and gardens in another part of our business and one day a conversation was had as to whether they could maintain our wall. That was a turning point, now we had access to gardening experts who were keen to learn about maintaining green walls. They started an apprenticeship and developed their knowledge around the best plants, watering regime etc.

It’s been a fruitful collaboration; the wall gets many compliments from our customers and St. Helier Parks and Gardens has gone on to win national awards for their innovative work around St. Helier. Perseverance has been the name of the game and the wall remains a unique feature in the café culture of Jersey.