Ms. Katzander was giving these pouches — handmade of geotextile fabric and stitched with the same sturdy thread NASA uses — the once-over in her role as a practitioner of one of the cooler trends in urban horticulture. The founder 15 years ago of a landscape company called Mingo Design, she brings her aesthetic to everything from rooftop gardens to brownstone backyards.
Her specialty is vertical gardens — walls of greenery that grace interiors and exteriors of residential and commercial buildings around the city and beyond.
These leafy expanses, sometimes flecked with flowers, can evoke anything from a tropical jungle to a Monet landscape. But because gardens were intended to be horizontal, not vertical, and because water, left to its own devices, flows down, not sideways, they are challenging to maintain.
Various devices help these gardens thrive. Ms. Katzander’s magic bullet is the little mesh container she has christened the Mingo Pouch, which in her opinion is critical to a successful vertical garden because it allows each plant to have its own miniature ecosystem.
“Cute, right?” Ms. Katzander said, affectionately eyeing the one in her hand. She made the first Mingo Pouch several years ago, and so far has made thousands of them. They can even go in the washing machine. They solve a problem that can doom vertical gardens — soil falling off the wall and onto the ground. “So the question,” she said, “is how do you plant on a wall? The pouches were the answer. They were the turning point, the aha moment.”
Ms. Katzander’s route to vertical gardens began three decades ago on Fishers Island, off the eastern end of Long Island, where her father ran a marina, and she grew up dreaming of life as a marine biologist. In her late teens, she was more or less adopted — “like a stray cat,” as she put it — by Dan and Sally Gordon, an island couple who hired her as a caretaker.
“I did landscaping, fertilizing the lawn, the works,” Ms. Katzander said. “A lot of what I know, I learned from Sally.” Though she describes herself as “100 percent self-taught,” she has taken many courses in landscape design and reads voraciously in the field. By the age of 21, she had set up a business with seven employees.
In 2009 she designed a 2,260-square-foot vertical garden for the PNC Bank headquarters in Pittsburgh. These days clients ask her to create vertical gardens for their homes or offices, or to provide T.L.C. for gardens that aren’t doing well. Ms. Katzander can produce a small garden in weeks, even days, for a cost of $75 or less per square foot.
Although her services include installation and maintenance, her passion is for the design end of the job. “I love complicated things, and I love vertical gardens because of the complicated design,” she said. “The sun moving around, the shade, the different plants, putting it all together. I love the abstractness, the complicated mix of aesthetics and functionality. Creating these gardens is like building with blocks.”
Ms. Katzander is one of a number of landscape designers around the globe who design and plant vertical gardens. They represent an alluring option, especially for New Yorkers who often live surrounded by concrete with limited space for greenery.
“A lot of landscape designers are creating these walls, and there are a lot of different approaches out there,” said Karen Daubmann, the associate vice president for exhibitions of the New York Botanical Garden, which has installed vertical gardens in connection with exhibitions. “They’re not easy because there are so many technical issues — irrigation, proper nutrients, choosing the right plant palette. But people like being surrounded by plants, so why not?”
Patrick Blanc, a French botanist whose book “The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City” is considered a classic work on the subject, agrees that when it comes to vertical gardens, the challenges are great and the avenues varied. “In nature,” Mr. Blanc said, “plants grow in many different ways, and when it comes to creating vertical gardens, many things are possible. Different people have different approaches.”
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