The Way i Go

When Patrick Blanc was a boy, he suspended plants from his bedroom wall and ran their roots into a fish tank. The greenery received nourishment from the diluted—ahem—fertilizer and purified the water in return. Forty-five years on, the French botanist’s gardens have grown massive in scale. One inside a Portuguese shopping mall is larger than four tennis courts, and there’s one in Kuwait that’s almost as big. But Blanc’s recently completed facade for the Athenaeum hotel in London (shown) could be his most high-profile project yet. Looming over Green Park, it’s an eight-story antigravity forest composed of 12,000 plants.

Blanc, who still has a fish-tank setup in his apartment, says his creations will always reach upward: “I leave horizontal gardens to others. I only think vertically.”

Blanc’s largest garden lies on Rue d’Alsace, in Paris, covering more than 15,000 square feet.

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