The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City

Patrick Blanc

Praise for The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City

"[A] must for anyone who wants to create a magnificent arrangement of plant life and doesn't have much horizontal to work with."
—The Midwest Book Review

"This long awaited book will not disappoint those who have been looking for the definitive account of the spectacularly beautiful and striking live walls and vertical gardens of Patrick Blanc, the visionary French scientist and artist….[O]f equal value and interest to the serious horticulturist and botanist, artist, landscape and garden designer, architect and engineer. It is beautifully produced and wonderfully illustrated, engagingly written, and has sufficient technical detail to clearly explain how the seemingly impossible has been achieved. Coming away from the book, it is impossible not to use the word 'genius' for his single-minded translation of the working natural habitat on to buildings in the harsh urban cores of major cities."
—BBC Gardens Illustrated

"Presented in these pages are the dream-like constructions of a modern-day Henri Rousseau, whose single-minded botanical pursuit has become an art form."
—The New York Times

"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."
—The Reckless Gardener

Overview

The secrets of plants that cling, grip, and climb, from the inventor of the vertical garden. Patrick Blanc, an artist with a green thumb, has created dozens of his admired botanical tapestries in public and private spaces around the world, including the Jean Nouvel–designed Quai Branly Museum in Paris, the Marithé & François Girbaud boutique in Manhattan, Herzog & De Meuron’s Caixa Forum in Madrid, the aquarium in Genoa, the Siam Paragon mall in Bangkok, and the 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, Japan. In this luscious, oversized, all-color book, he explains how to create plant walls using over 1,000 plants, drawing on his observation of natural milieus, his technique of growing on vertical surfaces, his savoir faire, and his passion for plants.

About the Author

Patrick Blanc is a scientist at the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique). He won the French Society Award for Botany in 1993.

Watch an interview of Patrick Blanc by the Royal Horticultural Society and see examples of the works featured in the book!

ISBN 10: 0-393-73259-2
ISBN 13: 978-0-393-73259-7
2008 / 300 color illus / 192 pages / hardcover