‘Vertical Garden’ has wide appeal
Lynette Olson, Special to the Gazette
Friday, January 2, 2009
“The Vertical Garden From Nature to the City,” by Patrick Blanc is an absolutely beautiful book. It is visually stunning, with more than 300 color photographs from natural settings to manmade vertical gardens employed as exhibitions to integral parts of building architecture.
The book will interest the serious gardener and botanist, landscape and garden designer, as well as the architect and engineer. The photographer and artist will simply enjoy the visual impact of the work.
Blanc is a research scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and an artist who has studied plant life all over the world. His printed works have been published in French, English, German, Thai, Swedish, Italian and Japanese. In this book, he explains how to create plant walls using more than one thousand plants, drawing on his observation of natural settings and using his technique for growing on vertical surfaces.
The author tells us, “The Vertical Garden allows man to re-create a living system very similar to natural environments. It’s a way to add nature to places where man once removed it. Thanks to botanical knowledge, it’s possible to display natural-looking plant landscapes even though they are man-made. Besides, thanks to its thermic isolation effect, the Vertical Garden is very efficient and aids in lowering energy consumption, both in winter (by protecting the building from the cold) and in summer (by providing a natural cooling system).
“The Vertical Garden is also an efficient way to clean up the air. In addition to leaves and their well-known air-improving effect, the roots and all the micro-organisms related to them are acting as a wide air-cleaning surface with the highest weight to size efficiency. On the felt, polluting particles are taken in from the air and are slowly decomposed and mineralized before ending up as plant fertilizer. The Vertical Garden is thus an efficient tool for air and water redemption wherever flat surfaces are already extensively used for human activities.”
Originally published in French, “The Vertical Garden From Nature to the City” is divided into three sections: natural habitats, impact of plants on architecture, the vertical garden. Each section explores the themes both in words and pictures. As an adjunct to the book, there is a wonderful slideshow presentation to be found at Blanc’s Web site: http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/mainen.php. Another opportunity to gain an interesting perspective of his work is the “Patrick Blanc, Vertical Garden interview in Paris” that can be viewed on you-Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63D2UkkTtBQ.