Sometimes called "Green Walls" or "Vertical Gardens," living walls are easier than ever to plan and grow! Grow a Living Wall is the first wall-gardening book to focus exclusively on the needs of home gardeners. Make your vertical garden environmentally friendly and sustainable. It's easy with author Shawna Coronado's help! One of her themed vertical gardens is stocked mostly with flowers to make it a haven for bees and other pollinators. Other gardens are filled with vegetables and herbs so anyone with an outdoor wall can grow their own food - beautifully! Even more gardens promote aromatherapy or medicinal plants. Some are designed to provide a green net of air filtration near a living area, or to protect exterior walls from exposure to direct sunlight, which helps to keep the indoors cool. In addition to the comprehensive, step-by-step information that explains the basics of vertical gardening, each of the 20 featured gardens has its own chapter filled with useful tips, stunning photography, and fascinating background stories that point out how much difference a small garden can make. Like author Shawna herself, the gardens you'll find in Grow a Living Wall are positive, life affirming, and sure to produce a smile or two.

There is ample evidence as to how the modern masters, in their shared pursuit of formal inventions and constructional inventions, variously referred to past examples they had freely chosen as guides that could inspire and support them in their strenuous pursuit of new things. The buildings shaped like soft clouds and gelatinous bowels, or the spiked bravura pieces designed by today's fashionable architects have no relation with either construction or history. Louis Kahn, instead, kept form, structure and history paradigmatically together. The book systematically reviews the intense structural experimentation that, in terms not just of building engineering but of spatial and representational potential, marked Kahn's work since the beginning and would eventually lead him, after a long apprenticeship, to an almost constant adoption of 'hollow' structural forms. By reviewing this long and intense journey of research, the book underlines how Louis Kahn, in each work and based on a constant dialogue between structural innovation, building tradition and figural evocation, succeeded in awakening our interest in a new 'fascinating' structure and at the same time our emotion for a deeply meaningful, universal and timeless form.

We build border walls to keep danger out. But do we understand the danger posed by walls themselves? East Germans were the first to give the crisis a name: Mauerkrankheit, or “wall disease.” The afflicted—everyday citizens living on both sides of the Berlin wall—displayed some combination of depression, anxiety, excitability, suicidal ideation, and paranoia. The Berlin Wall is no more, but today there are at least seventy policed borders like it. What are they doing to our minds? Jessica Wapner investigates, following a trail of psychological harm around the world. In Brownsville, Texas, the hotly contested US-Mexico border wall instills more feelings of fear than of safety. And in eastern Europe, a Georgian grandfather pines for his homeland—cut off from his daughters, his baker, and his bank by the arbitrary path of a razor-wire fence built in 2013. Even in borderlands riven by conflict, the same walls that once offered relief become enduring reminders of trauma and helplessness. Our brains, Wapner writes, devote “border cells” to where we can and cannot go safely—so, a wall that goes up in our town also goes up in our minds. Weaving together interviews with those living up against walls and expert testimonies from geographers, scientists, psychologists, and other specialists, she explores the growing epidemic of wall disease—and illuminates how neither those “outside” nor “inside” are immune.

A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.

After losing someone she loved, artist Candy Chang painted the side of an abandoned house in her New Orleans neighborhood with chalkboard paint and stenciled the sentence, "Before I die I want to _____." Within a day of the wall's completion, it was covered in colorful chalk dreams as neighbors stopped and reflected on their lives. Since then, more than four hundred Before I Die walls have been created by people all over the world. This beautiful hardcover book is an inspiring celebration of these walls and the stories behind them. Filled with hope, fear, humor, and heartbreak, Before I Die presents an intimate portrait of the dreams within our communities and a chance to ponder life's ultimate question.

"In this profoundly moving memoir, Owita teaches Wall how to find grace amid heartbreak and to accept that beauty exists because it is fleeting—as in her garden, as in life." —People, 4 stars "A perfect spring awakening." —Good Housekeeping A true story of a unique friendship between two people who had nothing—and ultimately everything—in common. Carol Wall, a white woman living in a lily-white neighborhood in Middle America, was at a crossroads in her life. Her children were grown; she had successfully overcome illness; her beloved parents were getting older. One day she notices a dark-skinned African man tending her neighbor’s yard. His name is Giles Owita. He bags groceries at the supermarket. He comes from Kenya. And he’s very good at gardening. Before long Giles is transforming not only Carol’s yard, but her life. Though they are seemingly quite different, a caring bond grows between them. But they both hold long-buried secrets that, when revealed, will cement their friendship forever.

A haunting gothic tale by master mysery writer John Bellairs--soon to be a major motion picture starring Cate Blanchett and Jack Black! "The House With a Clock in Its Walls will cast its spell for a long time."--The New York Times Book Review When Lewis Barnavelt, an orphan. comes to stay with his uncle Jonathan, he expects to meet an ordinary person. But he is wrong. Uncle Jonathan and his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Zimmermann, are both magicians! Lewis is thrilled. At first, watchng magic is enough. Then Lewis experiments with magic himself and unknowingly resurrects the former owner of the house: a woman named Selenna Izard. It seems that Selenna and her husband built a timepiece into the walls--a clock that could obliterate humankind. And only the Barnavelts can stop it!

A haunting feminist sci-fi masterpiece and international bestseller that is “as absorbing as Robinson Crusoe” (Doris Lessing) While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness. Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman and her animals, a thrilling survival story, a Cold War-era dystopian adventure, and a truly singular feminist classic.

Make a beautiful, practical, environmentally conscious garden, even in a small space - grow UP with a living wall!

This book introduces a revolutionary new concept to gardeners. Planting on roofs and walls began in Europe, but it is now becoming popular all over the world. Green roofs and walls reduce pollution and run-off, and also help insulate and reduce the maintenance needs of buildings. Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls discusses the practical techniques required to make planting on roofs and walls a reality. It describes how roofs may be modified to bear the weight of vegetation, considers the different options for drainage layers and growing media, and lists the plants suitable for different climates and environments. This informative book will encourage gardeners everywhere to consider the enormous benefits to be gained from planting on their roofs and walls.