My friend Bryan Wu sent me this Wired article about Patrick Blanc‘s enormous vertical gardens. The one pictured above is on the exterior of London’s Athenaeum hotel. It is eight stories tall, with 260 plant species and 12,000 plants.

What’s remarkable is that Blanc is a botanist who carefully selects plant species for climate, wind, and sun versus shade. He has worked with Herzog & de Mueron on the CaixaForum in Madrid, and installed a huge indoor wall at the Taipei concert hall. Below is his largest wall, 15,000 square feet, on the Rue d’Alsace in Paris.