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Vertical gardens: reconciling city with nature

Blanc’s newest venture, a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, will feature bands of vertical gardens 200 meters (600-feet) high.

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PARIS: For Patrick Blanc, designing part of France's most celebrated new cultural institution, the Quai Branly museum in Paris, is nice and all, but what he’d really like now is a dark underground parking lot or a public housing project or a dingy metro tunnel. The botanist is seeking urban fabric to bring back to life.

To be precise, Blanc wants to bring life to those bleak urban outposts — plant life, that is. The botanist is the master of the master of vertical gardens in cities from Paris to Bangkok, a technique for developing towering walls of vegetation that defy gravity to scale vast stretches of two-dimensional space.

“I try to reconcile the city with nature,” he said. There, spread across an 800-sq-meter facade, is the lush patchwork of thousands of individual plants he designed for the museum's architect, Jean Nouvel.

Blanc’s newest venture, a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, will feature bands of vertical gardens 200 meters (600-feet) high.

Blanc, a botanist with the prestigious French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), has done 30 years of research on the continents covered in the museum's collections, foraging beneath the plant canopy, studying low-light plants and gleaning their means for survival.

The vertical garden — or vegetation wall, as he prefers to call it — puts his findings to good use, taking a cue from the less domesticated species of the jungle on how to prosper with little light, soil and water. A bit of modern technology — waterproof PVC boards as a base, felt layers into which to stick the plants, punctured hosepipes to provide drip irrigation, the occasional dose of nutrients — help complete the technique.

Blanc’s first expose of his now-trademarked method of planting vertically, at the International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire in 1995, drew immediate acclaim.

It led to commissions including private homes across France, Paris’ hip Pershing Hall hotel and the Fondation Cartier museum — also designed by Nouvel — as well as fashion boutiques in New York and other European cities, a restaurant in Los Angeles, and a luxury mall, the Siam Paragon, in Bangkok.

Big commissions like the Quai Branly still thrill him, but he confesses to a penchant for the urban underbelly. “There are so many places that need (a vertical garden),” he argued, a gleam in the eye. “Parking lots, train stations, the metro — all those difficult spots, those places where you really don’t expect to encounter the living — that is what interests me above all else.”

One planned project is to take over a giant wall of a public housing complex, with a Blanc-designed vertical garden in the spaces between the facade windows, and the area close to the windows to be filled in by residents.

“People can put whatever they want. It'll be watered automatically. I mean, how great would that be? All the pluses of having plants without the inconvenience of having to take care of them!” he added, modestly.

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