Book Review - The Vertical Garden

For the first time this year, I have started to take notice of vertical planting – the concept of allowing both plants and buildings to live in harmony with one another.

Then by a strange co-o-incidence I received Patrick Blanc’s ‘The Vertical Garden’ – From Nature to the City. If you haven’t really given vertical planting much thought, Patrick’s book will change that. I certainly had not appreciated Blanc’s work in covering naked walls all over the world in lush green planting but by the end of the book I was more than ‘hooked’.

Patrick Vertical Garden System, known in French as Le Mur Végétal, allows both plants and buildings to live in harmony with one another. It relies on a new way to grow plants without any soil, in any city, in any part of the world. A naked wall can be turned into a Vertical Garden and thus be a valuable shelter for biodiversity as well as a way to add nature to the daily life of city inhabitants.

In his book, Patrick describes the origins behind his concept and helps us understand how the plant wall has a real future for the well-being of people living in cities. A scientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique since 1982, he won the French Society Award for Botany in 1993. He has created dozens of his admired botanical tapestries in public and private spaces around the world including the aquarium in Genoa and the Siam Paragon mall in Bangkok.

In the preface to the book, Jean Nouvel comments that: “A new element has been added to the architectural lexicon. A scientist has given rise to the integration of pleasing new sequences into architectural designs that, in today’s environment, are in desperate need of them.” As you leaf through this colourful and beautifully photographed book, you will come to appreciate that vertical gardening does indeed offer a new solution to urban planners, architects and developers.

Patrick (right) argues that it is possible to set up Vertical Gardens on any wall, whatever its size. The book firstly takes us to the natural habitats that have influenced him, so we get some pretty splendid photography of waterfalls, seeping rocks, caves and forest understory. He then shows the impact of plants on architecture and finally from the idea to the concept, structure, installation and maintenance.

There are some inspiring and clever examples in this book and many that those of us with somewhat smaller spaces could easily adopt on our own buildings and walls.

This is a large format coffee table book but to produce anything less would not pay justice to the stunning photographic plates. There is plenty of informative text and you will find it fascinating to follow Patrick through some of his designs and appreciate what his thoughts were as he takes us on a tour of the world.

He is currently involved in his first UK project – a green wall for SOM which will be used on a three-storey building at Learmouth Peninsula in London’s docklands. Todate this will be the biggest green wall in the UK and I bet it will be absolutely stunning.

This is a book which will have wide appeal both to amateur gardeners who are interested in innovative gardening and to students and practitioners of garden design who may wish to adopt some of Blanc’s techniques. The stunning photography adds to an authoritative text and will leave you with a much clearer appreciation of how we can use the vertical to add nature to our daily lives.