After seeing a soil-free, living wall system at an eco-roof conference in March, Candace Stoughton, the low-impact development specialist at the East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District, started thinking about her office on North Williams Avenue.

“We didn’t have a living wall on our property, and at our office we really want to demonstrate all of the different ways to manage rainfall runoff to keep our streams clean and healthy,” Stoughton said.

EMSWCD, a local government group, works to conserve water and keep soil healthy by offering free workshops, reaching out to the public and funding conservation projects.

And the EMSWCD’s new bike shelter is now its first to sport a living wall system, which was installed last week. The technology, developed by a Sequim, Wash.-based company called , is sold in pre-vegetated sheets that can be glued onto any surface.

The startup’s CEO, Roy Hellwig, also works as an architect. He has many ideas for new applications.

“The neat thing about this product is that as long as it gets air and moisture, you can put it anywhere, at any orientation,” Hellwig said. “It doesn’t even need to be mounted – you could put it in the air like a banner, wrap a column with it (or) wrap an entire building with it.”

The flexible mats also can be installed in more conventional living roofs. Peninsula College last year installed 4,600 square feet of the mats on its arts and science building. The roof is now home to a custom variety of epiphytes – plants and lichens that thrive on the water and nutrients they acquire solely from the air.

Although the epiphytic system has never been installed on a wall before, Hellwig said the customized selection of plant species will adjust well to the bike shelter. The walls are mostly living moss, with lichens and licorice fern sprucing up the arrangement. All of the species are native to Oregon, so they adapt well to the climate and require basically no maintenance.

The epiphytic system costs anywhere between $9 and $18, depending on how many ferns and lichens, which cost more, are incorporated. But production costs are continuing to drop, according to Hellwig. Archiphyte’s next goal is to grow the plants on the sheets, and avoid harvesting and transplanting them.

Now that the living roof at Peninsula College has successfully survived a full weather cycle, Hellwig is seeking to expand promotion of the technology and engage in new commercial opportunities.

“These would be cool on freeways – on those concrete walls for sound control,” he said, adding that the backs of billboards and geodesic domes also would be good candidates. “You can put these on forms that could never handle living surfaces before.”

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