A Vincent van Gogh painting as hanging garden.  The National Gallery in London has reproduced a work of Van Gogh with living plants. The wall is outside and the painting hangs inside.

He wrote to his brother Theo about it, when he was in the Saint-Remy psychiatric hospital in France. He had painted "Cornfield with cyprusses'" in September 1889. It was the last in a series of three, almost identical paintings. "I have a canvas with cypresses, some ears of corn, two poppies, a blue sky like a piece from a Scottish tartan. The last was thickly painted and the cornfield in the sun, the extreme heat visualised, also very thickly.

Cornfield with cypresses
Vincent van Gogh considered this landscape as one of his best works that summer.  He used the same composition for a pen and ink sketch (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) and for two other oil paintings, one of which hangs in the National Gallery. What he could never have imagined is that "Cornfield with Cypresses" is to be seen hanging outside the National Gallery. In this case in the form of what the designers call a 'vertical garden'.

If you walk straight past it, the National Gallery's temporary fence on Trafalgar Square is a large, soft green carpet. Tourists and Londoners pass by, smelling the plants and asking themselves if they are real. They are real. Seen from a distance of roughly ten metres, the 'living wall' starts to resemble a painting. And if you hold a copy of Van Gogh's masterpiece next to it, you can see that the plant wall is an exact copy of it, albeit several sizes bigger. Still further back and with eyes half closed, the painting and the 'living wall' are barely distinguishable from each other. 

8000 plants
8000 different plants, comprised of 26 varieties, make up the wall. Every plant has been planted by hand in one of 640 plots. "I can see the cypresses" says an Indian tourist. "But the blue sky and the red poppies in the painting - I don't see anywhere on the wall." It's a remark that's often heard. As the 'living wall' professes to be an imitation of a famous painting, it has to look like it, say some tourists.

Central Theme
"Ridiculous', says an old Italian gentleman. "It's about the interpretation.  If there's a central theme to this work, it's the breeze rippling through the cornfield. And see how those yellow grasses are moving on the canvas. Totally in the spirit of Van Gogh." 

Blue Becomes brown
"The problem," says Steve McIntyre, one of the designers, "is that few sky-blue plants exist. But if there were: what's blue in June, looks quite different in September. Browner, shriveled. That is the hallmark  of a 'living wall'."

The wall, which has an in-built irrigation system and has to be trimmed every two weeks week, will probably become the most photographed 'fence' in London before it's dismantled in October. 

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