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Monday, June 6, 2011

Green to Go: 5 Mobile Gardens & Portable Garden Projects


Ever see a shopping cart piled high with plants? How about a greenhouse on the back of a pickup truck?
No, then perhaps a flatbed garden on wheels? Or at the extreme of eco-strange: how about a typical mobile-home trailer that folds out into an entirely fake green garden – the ultimate portable kitsch patio?

Growing on the go, these gardening concepts are all works in progress – some have been realized while others are still (in some cases far-fetched) ideas for a greener future. This art piece by Kevin Van Braack, for instance, leaves some, well, ‘real green’ to be desired – for now at least.

Spotted on the streets of Brooklyn, New York, these strange green machines are (pardon the pun) sprouting up left and right – miniature, self-contained and street-safe greenhouses fitted to the backs of a typical truck.

Taking it a step further, Joseph Baldwin has proposed to plant wildflowers and prairie grasses on flat train-car platforms to be towed behind urban mass transit vehicles for the benefit of a broader public audience.

A more eco-friendly option presented by Annechien Meier involves an energy-free community garden made up of a wooden platform on rubber wheels that can be towed manually and parked anywhere.

The S.O.S. variant on this mobile-themed, go-green port-o-gardening subject is perhaps a bit more sustainable than the rest – if sillier. Instead of tying the greenery (literally and metaphorically) to symbols of industrialization (in the form of fuel-powered vehicles) the idea takes the ever-available abandoned shopping carts of any city and turns them into food-producing miniature gardens-to-go.