4 Ways of Looking at a Garden

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As Living Art
It grows straight up a wall, without soil, on a frame of metal and felt. French-born artistbotanist Patrick Blanc created a crude version of a vertical garden at age 12. Since then, his hydroponic plant walls have been found on museums, hotels, and office buildings around the world. Why do his botanical artworks have such pull with renowned architects? Blanc, 55, says that plant walls in an urban environment are even more energizing than those in a garden. Here, one of his best-known installations, an outside wall of Paris’s Quai Branly Museum consisting of some 15,000 plants of 150 species from Central Europe, China, Japan, and the United States.