Installed in 2009, The Athenaeum’s Living Wall has quickly become a symbol of the hotel. The garden begins at street level and reaches all the way to the 10th floor. It provides a subtle nod to the verdant splendour of Green Park just across the road, as well as being an important haven of biodiversity for London.
Our Living Wall covers an impressive 329 square metres, and the way in which we arrange the plants means we have the equivalent of 16 and a half middle sized trees on the wall. These plants purify the air around us by soaking up greenhouse gases and converting CO2 into oxygen. It has been calculated that our wall removes 757kg of CO2 and produces 559kg of Oxygen per year.
As well as the Living Wall, we’ve implemented more initiatives to operate more sustainably, click below to find out more.
The Living Wall was created by Patrick Blanc, an award-winning French artist and botanist. Blanc spent years studying the way that numerous wild plants naturally grow on vertical rock faces and trees. As a result, he has perfected a technique that enables urban plants to grow vertically without the need for soil.
Blanc has installed more than 140 vertical gardens for institutions all over the world, including the Quai Branly Museum in Paris and the 21st Century of Contemporary Art museum in Kanazawa, Japan. The Living Wall at The Athenaeum is Blanc’s first installation in the UK. The garden is made up of a mixture of native and exotic plants in a secure structure that juts away from the building. It’s nothing short of botanical architecture, and emblematic of the way The Athenaeum embraces innovation, imagination and individuality.
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