Library Fun Fact #3

Stanley Hart White sketch

In 1938 E.B. White (author of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, One Man's Meat, and co-author of my favorite, The Elements of Style) wrote in a letter, "I guess everyone has crazy brothers and sisters. I know I have. Stan, by the way, has taken out a patent on an invention of his called Botanical Bricks." Stanley Hart White taught landscape architecture at the University of Illinois. His bricks were described in the patent application as, "a method for producing an architectonic structure of any buildable size shape or height, whose visible or exposed surfaces may present a permanently growing cover of vegetation.”

From the creative commons

This idea of a green wall or vertical garden was intended for use in civic areas and world's fair type situations. Beginning in the late 1990s, it was brought back into fashion by the French botanist, Patrick Blanc. Blanc's work on tropical rainforests brought a new perspective to an older idea. By employing a wider variety of plants, integrating more bromeliads and tillandsias (who can capture their moisture from the air), plants that grow in caves, and other botanical treasures, Blanc designs vertical gardens that can survive in the concrete canyons of modern cities.

A photo I took of a vertical garden in Baltimore, MD.

References

Blanc, Patrick (2008) The Vertical Garden. NewYork: Norton & Co.

Hindle, Robert (2012) "A vertical garden: origins of the Vegetation-Bearing Architectonic Structure and System (1938)" The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign papers. 

Hindle, Robert (2013) "Stanley Hart White and the question of ‘What is Modern?’" in Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 33:3, 170-177.