Green, part IV - A vertical garden

This may look like it just another lawn—a lawn that could be just about anywhere in the world for that matter—but it might come as a surprise that this particular patch of grass is actually growing on a wall.

As you walk (or drive, or take a bus) along the tree-lined & traffic-busy Viale Giovane Italia, at first you may notice that what appears to be someone's garden is spilling over the top of its wall. But as you draw closer, rectangles of varying shades & textures of green, not so random after all, begin to distinguish themselves.

 
As you come directly upon the tableaux of green, you will probably find yourself stopping to look skyward, and marveling at the arrangement of grass, herbs, ivy & other plants bringing the wall alive, then walking the full length—and back again—as you try to figure out how such a thing came to be...

Crossing over to the other side of the road, it's possible to get the full gist of what's happening on this crenelated wall; interspersed with metal panels, the composition of greenery reveals the geometry behind its design...

With its plethora of road signs, parked cars & a nearly non-stop flow of traffic, it wasn't easy to photograph this seventy-meter-long stretch of wall (which originally bound a convent, then a prison, and now a recently-transformed housing complex complemented by cultural/commercial activities). But these 'obstacles' did give me a chance to spend more time considering the garden from several vantage-points, and I also really enjoyed observing people's reactions to the unusual wall treatment.

I like the three-dimensional aspect, how the shadows (and some of the plants) extend below the rusty edges of the 'box' that contains the garden—not to mention the natural palette of rust that's formed in the few seasons since the vertical garden was a installed (seen in the quartet of images below). All in all, it's brought a rather inspiring, if fairly discrete, new landmark to keep an eye out for when in this part of Florence.

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It's worth pointing out that this recent addition to Florence's landscape alludes to one of the patterns from Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language—No. 246: Climbing Plants. While the carefully conceived, orchestrated & maintained design means it only loosely follows the premise set out by the pattern—that "A building finally becomes a part of its surroundings when the plants grow over parts of it as freely as they grow along the ground"—this vertical garden certainly captures the spirit of the pattern by helping to smooth the transition between built form & nature. And it is undeniably more alive & intriguing than the continual conglomeration of posters that once covered this wall (fascinating though these fleeting records of city-wide events can be, in their many-layered stages of pasting/peeling).

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I'll close with a photo of my once-blue hydrangea, which has now turned mostly green. It reminds me of how many other photos of 'GREEN' didn't make it into May's series of ROY G BIV-inspired blog entries, but they may well be used for an idea that's slowly evolving from the imagery of the lovely vertical garden composition. It has truly piqued my imagination!

{Click here to learn about Patrick Blanc, the Parisian botanist whose work has led to a recent emergence of vertical gardens in urban spaces.}

{Click here to read about Le Murate, the ex-convent-turned jail-turned-housing complex bounded by the vertical garden (it's in Italian, but there are some photos & additional links).}