Vertical Garden in Bangalore

We test the water feeding a live wall before fitting the irrigation line and add a filter or softening stage where the source is borewell water off the city's granite-gneiss rock, since scale buildup in a wall's driplines is one of the more common reasons a live wall thins out within its first year.

Cauvery-sourced municipal water, which supplies roughly 80% of the city, is generally gentler on driplines than local groundwater, so where a building has both connections we route the wall to the Cauvery line where that is practical.

Foliage for lobbies and facades

Bangalore's moderate year-round temperature, without the long, punishing summer of a city like Ahmedabad or Nagpur, lets us use a wider range of ferns and broad-leafed foliage on outward-facing walls than we could in a hotter, drier city, since the plants are not fighting sustained heat above the mid-30s for months.

Roughly two-thirds of the ground under Bangalore sits on the Peninsular Gneissic Complex, a mix of granite, gneiss and migmatite, and it is this rock that groundwater has to move through before it reaches a borewell, which is the reason hardness varies from one plot to the next depending on exactly what the drill passed through.

A city that has long imported and tested foliage

Lalbagh's own history includes successive superintendents importing and trialling plant species from outside the region since the 18th century, and that same trial-and-error approach, testing a plant against Bangalore's specific light and water conditions before committing to it at scale, is how we choose species for a live wall rather than relying on a supplier's generic recommendation.

A facade-facing wall on a tower along Outer Ring Road gets more wind and more reflected heat off glass than a wall in a sheltered courtyard, so the same species list does not automatically transfer between the two positions on one building.