TACOMA

november 2009

A Green Giant’s
Gift to Tacoma
 If This Wall Could Talk…

20 City Arts    november 2009

It would tell a tale of a friendly green giant, who came all the way across the ocean to  
carve out a little of the countryside and bring it to Tacoma as a symbol of what could be.

by Virginia Bunker

Photo of Patrick Blanc’s wall by Brian DalBalcon cityartsmagazine.com 21

 t is early September, and a handful of reporters, photographers,
architects, horticulturists and executives are gathered in the
parking lot of Goodwill’s new Milgard Work Opportunity Center
near Hilltop. Brilliant rays of sunshine reflect off the freshly poured
asphalt. It feels good to bask in the glow. If Patrick Blanc, a celeb-
rity French botanist/artist, wants to keep the crowd waiting, there are
worse ways to start a day.
Blanc’s fashionably late arrival provides time to contemplate his
work: a twenty-by-forty-foot vertical green wall on the east side of
the building at Tacoma Avenue and Center Street. The wall features
nearly 2,200 plants from ninety-six different species arranged in a
wavelike pattern that creates, according to the artist, an expression
of “freedom.” The installation of the plants and their supporting
framework took two weeks. At summer’s end there are few flowers
in sight, but the diversity of color, texture and form is remarkable.
From the palest gold-green leaves of creeping Jenny to the dark ev-
ergreen of a warty barberry, the wall is a resplendent multi-tonal
field: plush dark purple leaves of cascading coralbells, tufts of
stripy sedge towering above creeping raspberry, and the hot-pink
petals of brilliant sedum that will bloom through the fall. The wall
has also attracted hummingbirds, which have been stopping by for
a sip of nectar.
The work displayed at Goodwill is one of the more modest of the
verdant tapestries Blanc has created in the last ten years. Blanc’s
commissions span the globe from the 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art in Kanazawa to the Caixa Forum Museum in
Madrid. The art world has embraced him, but museums aren’t his
only gigs. Blanc has covered just about every type of wall imaginable,
22 City Arts    november 2009
for clients ranging from luxury retailers to private homes to first-
class airport lounges. While he has created two interior walls in New
York — one for a Marithé et François Girbaud clothing boutique, and
the other for Phyto Universe salon — the green wall in Tacoma is his
first exterior project in the United States. A Patrick Blanc installa-
tion at the Tacoma Goodwill is big news.
At 10:15 a.m. a black sedan pulls into the south end of the lot.
Blanc and his assistant, Jean-Luc le Gouallec, stride quickly toward
the waiting crowd. Blanc takes his spot in front of his vertical garden
and prepares to address the media. Le Gouallec observes from the
sidelines. Back in Blanc’s student days, when he was working on his
PhD on the physiologic adaptation of tropical plants, Le Gouallec
was his research assistant. With his dapper attire and fashionable
eyewear, the statuesque point man looks less like a science guy and
more like a model in French GQ. Blanc is less GQ, more Rolling Stone
meets  Artforum. His compact stature and shaggy hair recall Mick
Jagger, though Blanc at fifty-six is a decade younger. Like Jagger in
concert, the botanist exudes boundless energy. Perhaps it’s the col-
orific vibrations emanating from his clothing: green corduroy pants,
green alligator-print shoes and a shimmering black silk shirt em-
bossed with a leaf motif. Even Blanc’s hair is streaked with a broad
swath of green.
“Hello everybody. So sorry to be late.” Blanc’s English is heavily
accented and singsong. He smiles broadly and launches into his pre-
sentation, roughly fifteen minutes of rapid-fire information punctu-
ated by clicking camera shutters. He hardly pauses to take a breath.
Blanc says he is happy to have created a vertical garden for Goodwill:
“It’s a very interesting project and all of the people are very kind.”

Designed with a mix of native plants and nonnative species that
grow well in climates similar to the Pacific Northwest, the green
wall is progressing “very well.” At this stage the plants are very
young, but Blanc promises interesting developments in the seasons
ahead. There will be flowers in spring, summer — even a few in au-
tumn. “It’s important for people to have flowers, but the insects
and birds need them, too,” he says. “And I also think it’s important
for the young people coming here and learning many new things,
to see a piece of nature.”
Blanc speaks so passionately about nature that it would be easy
to assume that he lives year-round in some remote wilderness in a
straw-bale home. But that’s not the case. Born and bred in Paris,
Blanc is a self-proclaimed urban denizen. True, his scientific pur-
suits take him to many exotic locations, but he prefers life in a big
city. His art marries his passion for cities with his love for undis-
turbed natural habitats. For him, the vertical garden is an expres-
sion of freedom within the urban landscape.
Later in the evening, Blanc presents a slide show and lecture to ar-
chitects and landscape architects at the Washington State History
Museum. His first public realization of a vertical garden was in 1986,
but it is only in the last few years that he says the concept has really
taken hold. “At first nobody paid attention. Now, everybody thinks
it’s really interesting. Other people are trying — and that’s great. I
can’t cover all the walls of the world. And it’s always good for hu-
manity when a good idea emerges.”
(above) photo by Mark Thomas Deming; (opposite) sketch of planting pattern, courtesy of Patrick Blanc
“The plants are the
true artists, I merely
translate their
way of life.” – Patrick Blanc
Though no children were present at the lecture, Blanc con-
jured an image perfect for story hour. Standing in the projected
glow of a digital slide that covered his face in a mass of glowing
leaves, Blanc likened himself to “a giant with a knife cutting a
big piece of nature from the hillside and carrying it to the city
for the people to enjoy.”
With more and more of the earth’s population living in urban
areas, the opportunities for people to commune with nature are
diminishing. Yet Blanc is optimistic: “When you read the news-
paper you think we are lost and nothing is possible — but it’s
still possible to have a conversation between nature and the
town.” “Do you ever talk to your plants?” he is asked. “Mais
non! C’est stupide!” he replies. Plants can’t talk, he says, so
why would he speak to them?
When Blanc talks about people having a dialogue with one
of his vertical gardens, he doesn’t have words in mind. He
points out that unlike a horizontal garden where we see only
the leaves and flowers above the ground, the vertical garden
gives us a view of the complete organism. We can see the roots.
In the vertical presentation, the plants claim their space. Roots
intertwine. Relationships develop. “The wall is vertical as we are
vertical. It’s right in front of you,” he says. “It’s not something you
can crush with your foot like a horizontal garden, so you have much
more respect.”
While Blanc modestly credits the plants as “the true artists” and
says he is merely “translating their way of life,” he proudly takes
credit for the foundational design and irrigation system that he
perfected over four decades. The living wall is installed on a metal
framework covered with PVC. The plants’ roots are layered between
two sheets of felt and secured with long staples. Blanc explains how
the felt on the new Tacoma wall is already transforming into “a per-
fect growing medium.” Just as the roots are able to flourish in thin
layers of moss on a dead log in the forest, or in a few millimeters of
organic matter on rocks in the mountains, so too will they thrive in his
vertical garden. Many years of observation have informed Blanc’s
design, and most of what he has learned can be found in his book
The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City, published last year.
Between photos of his many projects, Blanc recalls the joy of his
childhood explorations in the Bois de Boulogne, an expansive park
and wood on the outskirts of west Paris. He attributes his lifelong
love of botany to those early days looking at plants near the park’s
waterfalls. His first breakthrough occurred when he was fifteen.
Attempting to purify the water in his fish tank, he clipped a piece
off of his mother’s philodendron and placed the stem in the tank’s
filtration system, positioning it just above the water line. The plant
thrived and reached for the sky. Soon, the tank was on the floor and
cityartsmagazine.com 23

Tacoma Goodwill CEO Terry Hayes 
fell in love with a photo of this
Patrick Blanc project in Madrid: a
green wall for Caixa Forum Museum.
Blanc was busy devising a six-foot trellis. He added more plants and
a “waterfall” with recycled water from the tank. He was captivated
by the idea of cultivating plants without dirt. His fascination with
vertical growth has never waned. Blanc has been traveling the world
to study plants since his graduate-school days in the late ’70s.
Blanc chooses many of the species in his green walls because
they naturally thrive in soil-free vertical conditions. His designs re-
flect careful consideration of the overall shapes, leaf structures and
dimensions of his plants. Often, he selects species according to how
they will relate with adjacent species. One example in Tacoma is a
generous planting of Mediterranean spurge near the top of the wall.
As the spurge grows it will provide a microclimate for the shade-
loving succulents underneath.
Blanc’s aesthetic follows function. Which is not to say that his
work isn’t conceptual or beautiful. It is. But Blanc’s work is not con-
ceptual in the same way that the white cube sculptures of Sol LeWitt
are conceptual. What’s revolutionary is how Blanc gets us to look at
the natural world in a new way by placing the garden in an unex-
pected context.
Contemplating Blanc’s slice of nature a few weeks later, I’m amazed
by the growth and interested in learning more about the plants. I
head inside Goodwill to see if there might be a plaque with plant
names. There isn’t — I will get that information later from the Teufel
Nursery — but a young woman working the counter at the Good
Buzz, the Goodwill café, makes a phone call. Soon PR manager
Matthew Erlich materializes to give me a tour of the building and fill
me in on its history.
In 2005 Tacoma Goodwill commissioned a study with the
University of Washington Tacoma Milgard School of Business to
examine the unemployment numbers in Pierce County. “The find-
ings documented about seventy thousand people between the ages
of eighteen and sixty-four who were not working but who wanted to
24 City Arts    november 2009
go to work,” Goodwill CEO Terry Hayes tells me later by phone. She
says that Goodwill’s leadership knew the unemployment numbers
were big, “but having the specific breakdown inspired the agency to
take action and to create a facility with the necessary training space
to help more people in the community.” The existing workforce de-
velopment center, built in 1965, was maxed out.
The new Milgard Work Opportunity Center, a sixty-three-thou-
sand-square-foot LEED Gold-qualified “green” building designed
by BCRA Architects and built by Rushmore Construction, has the
room that clients and staff need to accomplish their goals. The cen-
terpiece of the $21.7-million-dollar facility is the space occupied by
Resources for Education and Career Help (REACH). Taking up the
first and second floors of the building, this new partnership of agen-
cies provides career, educational and development services for at-
risk youth. Led by director Kurt Miller, REACH has twelve partnering
agencies, including Bates Technical College, Tacoma Community
College and Tacoma Goodwill. The third floor of the new building,
with a separate entrance on the west side of the building adjacent to
the original 1965 facility and Goodwill Outlet Store, serves adult cli-
ents with an impressive display of technology, including a distance-
learning lab, a playcare center and several sleek classrooms with
flat-screen computers. Also on the third floor are the Culinary Arts
Program and a restaurant, the Neighborhood Bistro, that is open to
the public. “The macaroni and cheese is to die for,” volunteers a
patron eating her lunch.
The vertical garden near the entrance speaks volumes about the
forward-thinking programs and services within. “We contemplated
many options for exterior artwork before coming across a photo of
Patrick Blanc’s work in Madrid. Once I saw it, I just fell in love with
it,” recalls Hayes. “The green wall signifies growth and vitality —
it’s the perfect artistic expression for Goodwill.” The Milgard Work
Opportunity Center was designed for innovative programs and job
training for people with disabilities and other barriers to employ-
ment. It’s not hard to find the metaphor between Blanc’s living wall
and people in search of a fresh start.
Back on the ground floor, I meet Korbett Mosesly, a peer advocate
in the REACH program. Mosesly, who works with people between the
ages of sixteen and twenty-four, offers insight into the process. “Last
week an eighteen-year-old came in. He had never officially worked.
Hadn’t volunteered. Hadn’t played sports. We’re going through a
list; thirty minutes in he says, ‘Well, I do some animation. I put this
project together. I used CS4 and I’m good at Photoshop.’ So we start
to build on that. We get it on paper. We write out paragraphs and tell
a little story because a resume is not just about previous jobs, it’s
also about showing talents, interests and accomplishments.”
How does Blanc’s vertical garden fit in? The upbeat peer advocate
puts it like this: “It definitely gives you a sense of possibilities. When
you see something that you’ve never seen before, and especially
when it has to do with nature, you say: Wow! That’s new. That’s in-
credible. You could get the feeling that other things are possible, es-
pecially when you come from an environment that may be closed off
or void of innovation. It sets the stage for a range of other things.”
Mosesly pauses for a moment to take in the lobby and the green
wall outside the window, then adds with a smile: “Helping people is
pretty fun. Being at the start of things is even more exciting.” 
Caixa Forum Museum, Madrid, courtesy of Patrick Blanc