I walked past this hotel so many times before I realised what made it so inviting.

Okay, so it’s kind of obvious when I take a photo and lead the post with it.

The Marriott hotel on College Street, Darlinghurst – across the road from Hyde Park – has a green wall (or garden panel, as the manufacturer calls it). It’s a garden of pre-grown plants, trained for vertical growing, and watered and fed by an automated drip system, and it all grows in a lightweight biodegradable foam (instead of soil).

It’s not cheap for the modules and drip system – an Age article last year quoted it at $1800 per metre.

Not cheap. And still reasonably token. But still far more striking and inviting than your typical hotel lobby.

Planting a green wall needn’t be as complicated as it sounds.

True, this is no ‘vertical garden’. There won’t be any eating from this bio-wall. If anything, it’s most likely eating into the walls of its host, the old Brackenbury & Austin warehouse on the corner of Wilshire and Devonshire Streets, Surry Hills, just up from the Bourke Street Bakery.

This is far from technologically based solutions to greening the city. It’s old school, the paint’s decomposing a rusty orange, the walls are sprouting all manner of ivy and even small trees. There are mandalas and Nepalese prayer flags, even a squiggly painted ‘Respect’ on the wall. And at some point in the distant past, it looks as though some of the plants may have sprouted from pots at the front door.

Looks like they’re struggling to fill the front space, too. There’s a sign out the front advertising it as a potential pop-up shop.