Infrastructure Malta said it is taking legal action against the private contractor responsible for maintaining a green wall of plants next to Marsa-Ħamrun bypass.

In a Facebook post on Thursday evening, the agency said the contractor had “failed to meet his maintenance obligations under the five-year agreement, leading to the wall’s degradation.”

It added that legal action was being taken to ensure the maintenance was carried out at the contractor’s expense.

The contractor is The Doric Studio, an architectural and civil engineering firm that was paid almost €480,000 to install and maintain the green wall for five years, according to a tender document for the project. Times of Malta has approached the company for comment.  

Although the company appears to have a section on its website dedicated to ‘living walls’ - featuring a photo of the green wall next to the bypass – the link was not working at the time of publication.

A Facebook page for Living Walls described on LinkedIn as a “landscape branch”, meanwhile, has not been updated since August 2022.

A tender document for the project names the contractor as The Doric Studio.

The IM announcement came just hours after Times of Malta sent questions to the Infrastructure Ministry about the wall, which on Thursday was found in a state of neglect, showing browned, dying and overgrown plants.

Inaugurated in late 2020, the bypass green wall was touted as comprising more than 27,000 plants across a 350-metre concrete retaining wall, “longer than the length of three football grounds,” according to an IM press release from the time.

The project includes an auto-irrigation system connected to a nearby reservoir, as well as CCTV cameras "to deter theft and vandalism”.

At the time of the wall’s inauguration, then-Infrastructure Minister Ian Borg said it would improve air quality and enhance the area’s aesthetic.

Parts of the green wall appeared lifeless. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli.

This is not the first time green walls have run into trouble; last year, a green wall near the prisons in Paola, costing €30,000, had to be removed after the plants died less than three years after its installation.

And in 2021, pictures of brown, dry plants on a green wall bordering Luqa attracted a storm of criticism online, with one social media post deriding the wall as a “pure waste of public funds”.