246 Climbing Plants

. . . two earlier patterns can be helped by climbing plants around the building: Trellised Walk (174) and Filtered Light (238).

A building finally becomes a part of its surroundings when the plants grow over parts of it as freely as they grow along the ground.

There is no doubt that buildings with roses or vines or honeysuckle growing on them mean much more to us than buildings whose walls are blank and bare. That is reason enough to plant wild clematis around the outside of a building, to make boxes to encourage plants to grow at higher stories, and to make frames and trellises for them to climb on.

We can think of four ways to ground this intuition in function.

1. One argument, consistent with others in the book, is that climbing plants effect a smooth transition between the built and the natural. A sort of blurring of the edges.

2. The quality of light. When the plants grow around the openings of buildings, they create a special kind of filtered light inside. This light is soft, reduces glare, and stark shadows - Filtered Light (238). 3. The sense of touch. Climbing and hanging plants also give the outside walls a close and subtle texture. The same kind of texture can be achieved in the building materials, but it is uniquely beautiful when it comes from a vine growing across a wall or winding around the eaves of an arcade. Then, the texture invites you to touch and smell it, to pick off a leaf. Perhaps most important, the texture of climbing plants is ever different; it is subtly different from day to day, as the wind and sun play upon it; and it is greatly different from season to season.

4. Tending the plants. When they are well-tended, healthy plants and flowers growing around the windows and out of flower boxes in the upper stories, make the street feel more comfortable. They bespeak a social order of some repose within the buildings, and therefore it is comfortable to be on the streets - one feels at home. It is as if the plants were a gift from the people inside to people on the street.

The contribution to the street.

Therefore:

On sunny walls, train climbing plants to grow up round the openings in the wall-the windows, doors, porches, arcades, and trellises.

A Pattern Language is published by Oxford University Press, Copyright Christopher Alexander, 1977.