Work in construction and you’ll be surrounded by a team that looks pretty much the same from build to build.
Not only will there be more yellow jackets than at the annual Ali G fan club forum, but there will generally be a line-up of architects, engineers, builders, tradespeople, planning consultants, surveyors, groundwork specialists and sometimes demolition firms . . .
But what about botanists?
Well until now there’s been no need for green-fingered friends but you’d better clear a desk in the site office and buy in some pot plants to cheer the place up.
Smart builds around the world are increasingly being run by crack teams of botanists, who are greening the urban landscape one skyscraper at a time.
On s1jobs you can find vacancies at all levels of the construction industry and, if you’ve been working in this sector for any length of time, you’ll know great strides have already been made in ‘green’ building.
Now that term doesn’t just include solar panels and ground-source heat pumps, it actually involves turning buildings green by incorporating trees and plants to clean up the environment.
Plants also provide insulation to capture some of the carbon that would otherwise cause further heating.
In Milan a new skyscraper has been covered in a Bosco Verticale – a vertical wood that contains as many trees as a hectare of forest.
In Cairo new apartments are under construction that are based around ‘mega-trees’ – man-made towers that are covered in plants.
And in São Paulo, in Brazil one hotel under construction will contain as many trees as an entire city park.
These are just a few of the green builds under way around the world – so this isn’t just a flash in the pan.
The botanical architecture movement was kicked off by French artist and botanist Patrick Blanc, who came up with the concept of Living Walls.
Now visit Paris, smart parts of London and forward-thinking cities around the world and you can see walls smothered in green ferns and flowering plants called ‘Murs Vegetaux’.
There’s strong evidence greenery also reduces stress and can support surprisingly large populations of urban wildlife, including birds and insects.
But providing the right conditions for trees to grow at altitude on exposed balconies and ledges, with their demands for soil and irrigation, takes specialist knowledge. Hence the botanists, who are now adding hard hats, hi-viz jackets and steel-capped boots to their working kit.
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