Sneaky snapshots

I finally got up close and personal with Patrick Blanc’s creations – firstly the vertical garden at The Driver and then the Mur-Vegetal at The Athenaeum!
I’ve taken some great close-up pics of the plants and structure and hope it helps all you aspiring vertical gardeners…

Although The Driver looks great from the outside, there’s no way of appreciating the wall up-close. Although they have a roof-terrace, it’s not in view of the wall. This is annoying for two reasons –

I couldn’t take pictures (not good for us!)

You only get to appreciate the wall when you’re NOT a customer (not good for the people who own The Driver!)

The following photos are therefore taken of The Athenaeum hotel near Hyde Park…

The effect of the huge swathes of plant-life comes from having lots of small plants grouped together.

Patrick Blanc uses a felt layer stapled onto a 1cm thick pvc sheet which is attached to a metal frame.  The felt shown above looks really recent as once the wall is established the felt layer discolours as it’s constantly moist from soaking up the water and delivering to the plants and other parts of the felt.

I’m not a felt expert but it looks like regular felt!

On closer inspection you can see that there is a really thin layer of plastic behind the felt.  I’m not sure if this is behind the entire felt cover as surely that would affect the water-absorption?  Maybe it’s for strength or just to contain part of the rootball?  

The intention is that the plants will use the felt instead of soil, although when peering inside one of the pouches i could see a small amount of soil.  This soil maybe from when the plant was transferred into the structure as Patrick says on his website that plants can either be from seed, cutting or already grown.

The felt allows the water to be soaked up and distributed.  The wall is kept constantly moist – as can be seen from the picture above – it was dripping continuously.  That water is then filtered and re-circulated through the arrangement.

I believe there is an elaborate piping system behind the felt and plastic layers.  There seems to be two main vertical pipes in the picture above and at least one horizontal just in the above section.

This picture is of the top of a window.  I believe the silver container on the top left collects the drips and the pipe then connects this to the rest of the network.  As you can see the pipes are intended to be hidden so as not to distract from the display.

The great thing about the felt is that over time it gets its own plant-life growing on it – moss, lichen etc and that greenery fills in the gaps where the plants may not have quite reached.

I recommend you go see Patrick Blanc’s creation at The Athenaeum hotel.  The wall goes all the way down to ground level so you can get right up close to it and plan your own vertical garden!