Vertical Gardens: Slide Show

This slide show accompanies our article about the popular trend of vertical gardens, with vertical gardens from Patrick Blanc, Flora Grubb, Michael Hellgren, and Woolly Pocket.

At left: Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris, features art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The building was designed by architect Jean Nouvel and the vertical garden on the exterior, was designed by Patrick Blanc and Gilles Clément.

See also our post about the National Gallery's Van Gogh Vertical Garden!

CaixaForum, Madrid, Spain

A renovation of an 19th-century electrical plant into a social and cultural center at the center of Madrid’s museum district has a living wall (designed by Blanc) that spans about 1,500 square feet and features some 250 species of plants. 

But this stunning wall comes with a hefty price tag: Blanc told the New York Times that his gardens cost around $680 per 10 square feet for materials alone. 

Pont Max Juvénal, Aix-en-Provence, France

One of Blanc’s vertical gardens, installed on a highway overpass in 2008, is striking enough to stop traffic. Blanc writes in his book The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City that when building open air gardens in temperate regions like this one in southern France, he imitates a naturally occurring gradation: starting at the bottom with plants that would grow in an understory (ferns, Heuchera, Pilea, Iris japonica), then moving up the wall with plants from rocky slopes (hydrangeas, Bergenia, Sedum), and finishing at the top with plants from exposed cliffs (conifers, Cotoneaster, Berberis).  

The Drew School, San Francisco, California

Blanc’s most recent garden is a work-in-progress. Right now, you can glimpse his signature felt and PVC base between the garden’s native Californian plants that are just starting to grow. In the next couple of months, Blanc’s garden will fill out to look like his other works, but in the meantime a live webcam installed on the site lets you check on the wall’s growth.

Natura Towers, Lisbon, Portugal

Swedish landscape architect Michael Hellgren’s vertical garden of about 300 species of plants covers three walls of the public square outside of the new headquarters of Doctors Without Borders. This picture shows the wall that gets the least amount of sun and is covered in ferns (Asplenium, Athyrium, Pteris and Polystichu), broad-leaved plants (Begonia, Pilea) and thin-leaved plants (Iris japonica and some types of Chlorophytum comosum).

Natura Towers Lobby, Lisbon, Portugal

Hellgren’s indoor vertical garden, installed in the lobby of the Doctors Without Borders headquarters, has a more tropical feel—it features exotic plants like Philodendron 'Burle Marx,' Philodendron giganteum, King Anthuriums, and a running waterfall.

SmogShoppe, Culver City, California

SmogShoppe, a green-themed event space, boasts an outdoor vertical garden constructed using a Woolly Pocket framework. Licorice, narrow-leaf chalksticks, cup and saucer plants, lion’s tail agave, and Sedum matrona, give this wall a pleasingly varied color scheme.

Marvimon, Los Angeles, California

Marvimon, another event space using Wooly Pockets, creates a vertical garden with a jungle-like feel, using rubber trees, bromeliads, kimberly ferns, silver vine, and spider plants that add splashes of color and texture.

Bardessono Hotel, Napa Valley, California

Flora Grubb’s Dr. Seuss-like vertical garden includes only varieties of the air plant Tillandsia. These plants are good options for vertical gardens because they naturally grow without soil. 

Flora Grubb Gardens, San Francisco, California

Grubb’s creation may look like a painting but it is actually a growing vertical garden of succulents. Grubb wrote in a post on her blog that the garden is extremely easy to maintain: she mists it with water every so often and sometimes prunes out overgrown plants, but mostly lets it be.