Living buildings (vertical gardening)

I've had to put the plastic posts on hold. In the mean time, I will post on other topics, such as vertical gardening...

n'asti and I were walking down the street in London one weekend we were down there, when we see this:

what the hell? somebody's covered this London building with plants!

Amazing! Somebody had covered a whole builing in central London with plants. n'asti had heard about this practice: Patrick Blanc, a French botanist, is exploring covering buildings in cities with plants. This practice he aptly named vertical gardening (in French: 'mur vegetal', the plant wall). The building in question was the Athaeneum hotel in Mayfair, London. Below is another picture from my mobile and the hotel's website has some clearer day time shots.

a vertical garden really stands out in the London skyline (even at night!)

Ecologically, I think this is a very interesting idea when it comes to fixing some atmospheric carbon using plants. I don't know how much growing area would be gained, but especially where there are very tall buildings, this would be significant. People are also speculating about 'coating buildings with algae'. I'm not sure how this could be more useful than covering them with plants when it comes to sinking CO2. And as somebody that works with algae I suspect covering buildings with algae is going to be a lot harder, if it makes sense at all. Algae might be better contained in building materials such as rooftiles, but this I will relegate to a future post!