Patrick Blanc's vertical garden
Patrick Blanc (born 1953) · 2006
On the street side of the museum an entire building seems to have been swallowed by vegetation. Ferns, mosses, sedges, heucheras, bergenias and hundreds of other species climb four storeys around the windows in wavy bands of green, grey and purple, and in summer the wall hums with insects and drips with mist from the watering system. It is the largest and most famous green wall in Paris, and it turned its maker, the botanist Patrick Blanc, into an international name.
Blanc is a scientist at the French national research centre who spent decades studying plants that grow on rock faces and tree trunks in tropical forests, where there is no soil at all. His wall works the same way. Behind the plants is a layer of thick felt stapled to plastic sheets on a metal frame, kept constantly moist with water and dissolved nutrients pumped from the top; the roots spread through the felt as they would over wet stone. Look for the patterns: Blanc plants in diagonal drifts of single species so that the wall reads from a distance like a painting, and he places shade-loving plants low and sun-loving ones high, matching the light on each part of the facade.
The wall was finished for the museum's opening in 2006 and holds around fifteen thousand plants from a hundred and fifty species, many from Japan, China, the Americas and Central Europe. It has needed several replantings after hard winters and periods when the irrigation failed, so what you see is a living thing that changes with the years rather than a finished object. Come back in a different season and it will have a different colour. It also links the museum to its collections in a quiet way, since the plants come from the same continents as the objects inside.
Did You Know? The plants grow with no soil at all, rooted in wet felt, the way ferns and mosses grow on cliffs in the tropics.
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