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If you walk along the left bank of the Seine between Pont d'Alma and the Eiffel Tower, you can see the unusual four-story administrative building of the Museum on the Quai Branly, the walls of which are completely covered with living plants from the sidewalk to the very roof. The museum itself has nothing to do with botany; it presents collections of "primitive art" from Africa, Oceania, Asia, North and South America. The green walls are just an elegant decoration that has made the museum one of the main attractions in Paris. This latest creation (2006) by Patrick Blanc, world renowned botanist, inventor and designer of vertical landscapes, will amaze museum visitors and passers-by.
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Patrick Blanc, a scientist at the prestigious National Center for Scientific Research, has spent nearly 10 years learning how to create vertical gardens of hitherto unprecedented complexity and scale. Having studied plant communities that exist on damp surfaces and in crevices of sheer cliffs and grottoes in Thailand, Malaysia and other countries of the world, Blanc developed ingenious ways to reproduce them both on the inner and outer walls of urban buildings. Using hundreds of living plant species from around the world as his palette, Blanc created 18 grandiose installations, most of which are located in Paris. A passionate advocate of biodiversity conservation, he has successfully proved that boring walls of city buildings can breathe, covered with plant tapestries. The walls of the administration building of the Quai Branly Museum are decorated with 15,000 specimens of plants representing 150 different species. This is a living canvas of ferns, mosses, herbaceous plants and even shrubs.
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Blanc's technology is unique and patented. The main question that the author had to solve was how to protect the walls of the building from moisture? The vertical garden is based on two layers of polyamide, between which there is a centimeter layer of foamed PVC fibers. This underlay is attached to the wall on a metal batten, providing air space between the wall and the plants. In the layer of fibers with capillary properties, there are plants in the amount of 10-20 specimens per 1 m2. The load on the structure is not very high - less than 30 kg per 1 m2. Plants do not need soil as they are, in fact, grown hydroponically. A drip irrigation system, fixed to the top of the wall, provides continuous, slow delivery of fertilizer solutions to the roots. Surplus mortar flows into a gutter at the base of the wall.
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The "plant wall" of the Quai Branly Museum faces north and is protected from the searing rays of the sun, which can pose a serious problem for vertical plantings, especially in summer.
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Patrick Blanc specially selects and combines plants for each installation, creating rich textures in various tones of green with a touch of yellow, red, brown. When decorating interiors, the designer uses mainly tropical species, adapted to low light levels and growing naturally in the lower tier of the rainforest. The conditions for the growth of plants on the outer walls are even more stringent, however, the range of plants for them remains extensive and includes lush fatsia and begonias, perennials such as saxifrags, bells, geraniums, heucheras, ferns, ivy, sage, veronica; from shrubs - buddlei, viburnum, hydrangea, honeysuckle, and certainly grasses and sedges.As in nature, on the surface of damp stones and fallen trees, these plants are underlain by mosses and liverworts.
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The observer can make out among the lush multicolor of the vertical garden badans, pachisandras, whole arrays of geyher, ferns, mosses and liverworts, interrupted by long leaves of sedges and grasses. Plants completely cover the facade of the building with exquisite tapestry in shades of lime, gold and burgundy wine. The curvature of the wall, following the bend of the street along the banks of the Seine, adds naturalness to the vegetation façade. And the large windows of the museum make the beauty of the vertical garden even more paradoxical.
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Not surprisingly, Patrick Blanc's plant walls were born in Paris. They reflect the main tenets of French gardening: a wide variety of species, the presence of geometric frames, the use of high technologies that make fantasies come true, and certainly a certain amount of French sophistication.
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