After a Metro pillar on MG Road and another one below the Electronics City Expressway, the vertical garden experiment is now in Bengaluru’s Yeshwanthpur.
The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is looking to take the ‘greening’ initiative all across Bengaluru’s many flyovers and the project is likely to begin soon.
According to an official, taking up vertical gardening is like coming a full circle. He explains:
“We were once farming and growing trees here. Then we had to cut these trees to make space for concrete structures. Now we’re going back to these concrete structures and farming on them again. This may not generate food, but it certainly will clean the air we breathe.”
So far setting up of a vertical garden had been completed at three pillars across Bengaluru and the BBMP had spent close to Rs 7 lakh on them.
Each pillar has about 3,000 plants including aromatic, ornamental and foliage plants, and from native breeds too.
“These are mostly ground-cover plants that don’t grow too big. We would need to prune them once every 4-5 months. The first three pillars will have vertical gardens and the remaining will have creepers going up the pillars. We want to adopt different methods of planting and make the space green,” said environmentalist Ravindra TC.