The Vertical Garden

Do plants really need soil? No, they don’t. The soil is merely nothing more than a mechanic support. Only water and the many minerals dissolved in it are essential to plants, together with light and carbon dioxide to conduct photosynthesis.

- Patrick Blanc

As a teenager, in the late sixties, Patrick Blanc conceived the Vertical Garden as a biological filter for his tropical aquarium. During his university years he visited the South East Asian rainforests to observe his beloved aquatic Cryptocoryne species growing in the shaded forest streams and then he decided to study tropical botany. His Ph D, in 1978, concerned the growth habits of the plants of the Aroid family (Anthurium, Philodendron, Monstera, Aglaonema, Cryptocoryne). In 1982, he joined the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) and his research topic since that time concerns the adaptive strategies of the tropical rainforest understory species. This was the subject of his State Thesis (Doctorat ès Sciences) and he won the Botany prize from the French Academy of Sciences in 1993.

During these years he was also developing his Vertical Garden concept and finally patented it in 1988 and 1996. Consecutive to his first realizations in the late eighties (especially at the Museum of Science and Technology in Paris in 1986), he has been invited for the Chaumont International Garden Festival in 1994.

The success of his work was immediate and then the Contemporary Art institutions considered he was an artist and then they commissioned different permanent installations. In 2001, Andrée Putman invited Blanc for a huge installation on a blind wall at the Pershing Hall hotel in Paris and suddenly many famous architects have been interested by his work. Now, the closest collaborations are with Jean Nouvel and Herzog and De Meuron. Besides these collaborations, Patrick Blanc now designs many projects by himself.

Plants in the wild are growing on vertical surfaces