Patrick Blanc

Who is Patrick Blanc?

Patrick Blanc is a French botanist, working at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where he specializes in plants from tropical forests. He is the modern innovator of the green wall, yet recent scholarship on the subject suggest that the vertical garden was invented by Professor Stanley Hart White at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1938. Professor White patented the first known Vertical Garden, or "Vegetation-Bearing Architectonic Structure and System", as a treatise on modern garden design, predating Patrick Blancs contemporary patents by nearly 50 years Although Blanc did not invent the vertical garden, he is responsible for modernizing and popularizing the garden type. Blanc describes his vertical garden as follows:

This type of achievement exemplifies Blanc's ideas as an ecological engineer and also the 15th target of the Haute Qualité Environnementale project, although the latter gives particular stress to use of more local species, at least outdoors.

In 2009 he was awarded an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.