Second Nature is collaborating with Habitat Horticulture, the preeminent living wall designers, to design and test a biodiversity-oriented green wall. Most green walls employ plants with limited habitat value and can be expensive to install and maintain. We're experimenting with how to make a low-cost living wall that can make biodiversity accessible in dense urban settings with little opportunity for conventional green space. 

The prototype was established along the Berkeley Greenway (between Ashby Ave & Murray St) during summer 2025. Second Nature Ecologist and pollinator expert Emily Erickson worked with the Habitat Horticulture team to select a set of plant species for native bees, butterflies, and hoverflies. We're giving particular attention to the distinctive ecological opportunities these unique vertical spaces can provide, such as supporting native annual wildflowers that typically have a hard time competing with the invasive annual grasses on the ground. We also instituted a monitoring protocol to evaluate pollinator visitation.

We're excited to develop this new biodiversity intervention, which we think can help fill gaps in our site and neighborhood scale biodiversity strategies, complementing street trees, parks, green roofs, and other components.