Living Wall Systems are vegetated panels fixed to building facades. They’re celebrated internationally for cooling cities, enhancing biodiversity, absorbing carbon, and boosting the wellbeing of residents. Yet in South Africa they remain rare, hampered by high costs and a lack of region-specific guidance.

Terblanche’s team tackled this gap by interviewing 13 professionals, including quantity surveyors, botanists and landscape architects. Recurring concerns included punishing maintenance demands, structural risk, and a near-total absence of reliable cost benchmarks.

Those insights shaped a new system, Viridis 5045, engineered for Western Cape conditions. A galvanised steel frame bolted to the facade carries fifteen angled fibreglass troughs, each deep enough to hold a healthy volume of growing substrate so roots don’t dry out or overheat.

Inside, layers of expanded clay, soil and coconut husk mulch balance drainage against moisture retention, while a drip irrigation line feeds each trough individually. A separate drainage network carries excess water safely away, preventing the waterlogging that often kills vertical plantings.

Terblanche’s team filled the troughs with drought-tolerant indigenous species, chosen to survive the region’s patchy microclimates with minimal watering and few replacements. The team then modelled the system’s expenses over a hundred-year lifespan.

As with most green infrastructure, it never turns a profit, a result Terblanche treats less as a design flaw than as proof that financial return is the wrong yardstick for judging it. Living walls, she argues, should be valued the way parks and street trees are: as investments in cooler, healthier cities – not as money-making assets.

The Viridis 5045 model offers a regionally grounded blueprint for green walls built to actually survive South African conditions.