Reproduction based on an original drawing by Jordi López Querol.
Plants live in La Casa Verda. They fill it with life and colour. But for that to happen, simply planting them anywhere isn’t enough. Some need plenty of light, others more moisture. Some can live with very little soil. Others need quite a bit more.
Over time, we realised how much we liked seeing plants all around the outside of La Casa Verda. Wherever you looked, from any corner, there would be plants. They seemed to appear everywhere.
We also discovered that there were places where achieving this wasn’t so easy. Especially on some of the stone walls exposed to the summer sun for many hours.
We could have given up on having plants there.
Or we could try to make things a little easier for them.
In this appendix, we show three small building solutions that came out of that attempt.
1. Roots in the shade on the other side of the wall
In that area, a wall separates a north-facing side from a south-facing one. While it was relatively easy to keep plants growing on the first side, the summer sun made things much more difficult on the second.
One of the plants had branches long enough to pass through the wall. And Jordi came up with an interesting idea: What if the roots stayed on the north side while the plant emerged on the south side?
An opening was left in the wall to allow the plant to grow through it.
That way, the roots remained protected on the cooler side, while the visible part of the plant appeared on the other side.
It worked.
The plant managed to stay green even during the most intense summer heatwaves.
2. Planters to hold more soil
We wanted plants to grow on the wall. We planted a few. Many didn’t survive. The main problem was a combination of too little soil and too much direct sunlight. The sun heated the stones and, with them, the small amount of soil available. That’s why Jordi thought of building planters that could hold more soil and protect it better from the sun.
Looking at them, you might think those planters were built as a decorative feature.
But that wasn’t the case.
Their shape came from a much simpler need: to give the plants more soil and keep it better protected from the sun.
3. An overhang for the plants
On that wall, we planted a few plants that seemed able to survive with very little soil. They looked quite healthy in winter and spring, but when the hot summer arrived, they dried out. Even if you watered them every day.
Then Jordi came up with a solution.
What if we could give them shade during the summer without stopping them from getting sunlight in winter?
He built a small overhang using the same volcanic stone as the wall.
That solution served two purposes.
It provided shade for the plants growing underneath and, on top, it created space for soil so that other plants could grow on that same wall.
Today, someone might look at it and think it had been planned from the very beginning.
But no.
It came later, simply because we wanted some plants to be able to live there too.
None of these solutions was necessary to build the house.
We could have done without them. And without the plants we were trying to protect.
But over time, we learned something quite simple: every plant needed different conditions. More soil. Less sun. A different place for its roots.
And whenever we could, we tried to provide them.
Perhaps because, after living alongside them for so many years, something curious happened.
Seeing them happy made us happy too.
Perhaps that was reward enough.
We’ve been building La Casa Verda for years.
Without rushing.
Trying to care for every little detail.
We hope everyone who visits can feel the care with which it was built.
