Nature on the Wall Have Astonished and Delighted City Dwellers Around the World

How do you make the centre of a modern city more green? The French botanist Patrick Blanc simply grows plants on walls. His vertical gardens Nature on the Wall have astonished and delighted city dwellers around the world. The 1,200km2 façade of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris contains over 100 varieties 92 g 04/12 of plants. 04/12 g 93 By Paula Almqvist (text) very day, people stand on over 160 such vertical gardens all around no sign of a single speck of earth or even the banks of River Seine, the world, most of them in big cities. a flowerpot. This seems to be a floating looking up in wonder at the jungle surviving on air, water and light. Quai Branly Museum in Soil: An Overrated Myth? Patrick Blanc, who despite the cold is Paris. From dawn till dusk, dressed in shorts and flipflops, explains Ethe sound of shutters clicking and video A house visit in Paris. It’s a chilly, grey the principle underlying his verdant cameras whirring fills the air. Many of autumn day. The suburbs of Ivry- walls: “Earth is overrated. Many plants these people have come here not to visit sur-Seine houses an old working- don’t need any soil. They grow equally the wonderful ethnological museum class neighbourhood with a gruff, well in polyamide felt as long as they designed by the architect Jean Nouvel; multicultural charm, complete with a get a daily dose of 5 litres of water per they are here to see the verdant wall trucker’s café and an Arabian takeaway. square metre.” that has become the most photographed In the middle of carefully restored houses In Blanc’s annexe, you stand, sit and façade of Paris in recent times. in the Rue de Châteaudun is a dilapidated walk on water. He and a friend bought Plant-covered walls are hardly building with boarded windows. One this commercial plot 4 years ago. “The revolutionary; everyone has heard about gets the feeling that this may be the first thing we did was to dig out half a ivy. But what you see here isn’t just a green wrong address. metre of earth and replace it with a curtain; it is a lush vertical landscape of The man who opens the gate sports 20,000-litre water tank. I have always cascading leaves, mossy gorges and oases, a bright green quiff, is wearing a leaf- dreamt of a walk-in aquarium.” Now and tiny, colourful umbels growing under patterned shirt and has long fingernails. around 1,000 fish swim back and forth hanging branches. Dr Patrick Blanc is his own business card, in the temperature-controlled water It isn’t just the bewildering variety and his house is his laboratory. between the office and the patio. From the that takes a while to get used to. You The patio wall is hidden behind huge outside, the mega-aquarium is partially soon start to pick out well-known garden disk-like leaves of Giant elephant-ear, covered with wood and from the inside plants: ferns and hostas, holewort, lobelia, serrated leaves of Japanese aralia and the with reinforced glass so that Blanc can Irish moss and bergenias. The difference dainty, saw-toothed foliage of boehmeria. watch the shoals of startlingly colourful here is that, instead of looking down on The graceful blade-like leaves of Japanese fish darting under his feet while he works them, you have to crane your neck up to iris can be seen high above on the wall on his computer. see them from below. and the fig trees look like they’re touching Behind the writing table, an indoor The Paseo del Prado in Madrid the sky. This symphony of green patterns jungle proliferates. For 30 years, tropical houses the new CaixaForum Museum, and shapes induces a reverential silence. beauties have led the pampered existence much praised for its design by Swedish The eyes involuntarily hunt for the of wallflowers in Blanc’s house. In this architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de ground from where the metre-thick plant living picture, which looks like a simple Meuron. It attracts sightseers who come beds have emerged, but in vain: there is forest painting by Henri Rosseau, can The search for suitable plants for his to admire not the modern art but the green walls called Blanc back to the living work of art that covers the six-storey wild again and again, like the Bukit exterior like a carpet. This 600-square- Timah Nature Reserve in Singapore foot swathe of plants is woven together (above). For the planting of the from thousands and thousands of bushes Quai Branly Museum, he studied and shrubs—up to 300 different varieties. 10,000 pictures of plants to select So, how does one steal the limelight those species that would flourish from world-famous architects and even on a north-facing wall. Each of museums? It’s easy. All you need is a his creations is first meticulously metal frame, a PVC sheet, two layers of sketched out by hand. polyamide felt and an intricate sketch filled with scientific names of plants. The rest will be taken care of by a team of gardeners armed with seedlings, seeds, utility knives, staplers and glue. However, for this to actually work, your name must be Patrick Blanc. The 59-year-old French botanist has created 94 g 04/12 04/12 g 95 heads Nausicaá Aquarium, the National Sea Centre at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Between the eye-opening experience in his childhood and the construction of his first green wall, there were many years of apprenticeship and countless hours of investigation and experimentation. Patrick Blanc studied biology, and when When planning his wall gardens at he turned 19, embarked on his first Pont Max Juvénal, Aix-en-Provence, field trip to the rainforests of the Khao Patrick Blanc used nature as the model. Yai National Park in Thailand. The flora On precipices and screes, plants often spread overwhelmed him so much that his out in smooth diagonals along columns and water particular interest became not the giant channels. The office in Blanc’s home in Paris looks trees but the epiphytes and the intricate like a glade (right). There are philodendrons, Money diversity of the forest undergrowth. plants and other tropical plants entwined around From then on, he started travelling a walk-in aquarium. be found dozens of varieties of small convert many other badly constructed to all the major forests during his colourful birds buzzing and pecking. everyday structures into attractions. semester breaks. This was expensive Blanc explains that birds like Estrildid Such as a metro station in Tiflis, a bridge and to supplement his budget he would finches and White-eyes are passionate in Aix-en-Provence, shopping centres, sell ornamental fish at the department pest-eaters and very graciously replace parking lots, public buildings, the store Samaritaine on Saturdays. And in the insect spray. The aquarium also hitherto shabby marketplace in Avignon the evenings could often be found at the provides naturally fertilised water to and the previously grubby rue d’Alsace in legendary Alcazar Cabaret. Even now, nourish his plants. the area around the main station in Paris. Blanc feels as at home in the nightclubs Blanc has created this paradise in Blanc pours himself a glass of wine and and bars of the urban jungle as in the a very unlikely place on the outskirts scatters a handful of freeze-dried crabs to forests: “They’re both equally hot and of Paris. For the botanist, this isn’t a the fish, explaining that it all began 40 humid, and populated with extraordinary decorative cliché, but an approach. “As a years ago with these modest pets. and talented creatures.” kid, I was always fascinated by the Garden As a kid, he would use up all his pocket Blanc graduated when he was 25 of Eden because it thrived without any money on his aquarium, and would years old. His doctoral thesis was on human intervention. Paradise was a self- trade baby fish with Philippe Vallette, a plants of the tropical forest floor, which regulated system of plants and animals, neighbourhood friend. “When I was 15, manage to grow with only around 1 per exactly like the jungle. I didn’t much like I read something about the purification cent of the available sunlight: a principle the biblical story of the Fall, where man of aquarium water using the roots of that still comes in useful, since the bases had to work by the sweat of his brow.” indoor plants. Although I already knew of his living walls are frequently pitch- Blanc rolls his eyes every time the filtering effect of aquatic plants, I dark and sunless. someone calls him a gardener. He’s an never thought this could work even with avid garden-despiser, and he can’t stand so-called normal ones.” So, he cut a stem A Synthetic, and Hopefully the idyll of ‘the countryside’—“pseudo from his mother’s philodendron and put Frost-free, Jungle nature” he calls it. “Gardens and parks it in the filter cartridge. Soon, it started bore me because I feel patronised there sprouting roots and the fish started In Blanc’s dorm room in college, a mini- by the paths and straight lines that have playing hide and seek around it. jungle soon started to grow on a 2m-high been created by some well-meaning It dawned on him then that wooden board. In the early days, growing person.

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