Notes From The City: An Abundant Life

Gennaro Brooks-Church is an artist. When I met him at the New York Build Expo a few months ago, I was drawn into his display, not just because it was a living wall, but because the way it was constructed and the plants growing in it were extraordinary. I am a gardener, and I love plants of all kinds. I grow indoors and outdoors, and though there are plants that are advisable to only be grown in certain areas, I love them so much I'm always trying to grow them where maybe they might not usually be. I'd never seen a living wall with orchids growing out of it before I saw the living wall that Gennaro Brooks-Church had created for the Expo, and I was drawn to those favorite plants of mine like a moth to a flame. I started taking photos, and explained that I was planning to post a few photos on Instagram from the Expo, but only those things that really caught my eye because there were so many excellent vendors there. Instagram is a wonderful tool, but it's a strange and surprising one in that sometimes the things I think will look great just don't translate. But I knew that a living wall that was as striking as the one I was looking at would be an eye catcher for more people than me, and so I asked if I could have a business card because I wanted to follow up with a blog post if he had the time to meet again.

When I went out to the address he'd given me in Brooklyn, I expected to be visiting his workshop studio. I was, but it is also his home, in a brownstone that I recognized not just because of the address I'd been given but because of the Koi pond with turtles out front and the living wall growing on the side of the building. It was still a bit cool, and the day was rainy, but everything looked thriving and full of life. And that was just the beginning - when I went inside, there were more living walls indoors, and then Gennaro took me out to the back yard terrace that overlooked a fresh water swimming pool with an adult sized child's dream of a treehouse just beyond, with a variety of blooming spring and early summer plants beginning to bud, thriving and cascading in a gorgeous array of living colors and textures, seemingly wild, while being gently landscaped to reach their full potential on the canvas of the back yard.

My grandmother used to tell me stories about growing up in Manhattan on Hudson near Gaansvoort Street, above the bakery that her father owned and all nine children worked in. In those days there were no trees lining the streets the way they do in the West Village now, and when the family moved out to Brooklyn, she told me how surprised she was to see so many trees. She used to sit on her stoop and look at her surroundings thinking, "There must be more to life than this," and I think if she had ever met Gennaro Brooks-Church, she would have experienced the more that she was looking for.

As I began to write this piece and tried to think of a title, the first word that came to my mind was verdant. There is something about the spaces and even the individual walls that Gennaro creates that makes me think about the rich greens of nature in all their many hues. But that didn't seem enough, and then I started to think about adding the word luxury, but somehow that didn't seem right either. Although it is a luxurious experience to wander in Gennaro's back yard and his rooftop where he has a cascading fountain waterfall, what he is doing is bringing that luxury into every day settings and helping to bring us back to the place where we are connected to the earth around us. As I wrote a few weeks ago when I was writing about the artist Sandra DeSando, there have been studies done that show that the more time we spend in nature, even just simply breathing in the air and scent of dirt, the more positive our outlook, the less stress we feel, and the healthier we are in mind, body and spirit. That shouldn't be a luxury, it should be something available to us all, and Gennaro Brooks-Church has the ability to build living walls and green roofs, and to create environments that help us to get back to nature in the surroundings of our urban life. He can also build walls that are gardens, able to feed families during winter months or any months in the city, and he is able to design living walls for out-of-doors and building facades that will winter over and renew in spring. Originally a photographer, he has the eye and creative mind of a visual artist. Not only are the pieces and spaces he creates beautiful, vibrant and unique, they are practical and environmentally sound because he uses reclaimed wood and recycled materials and has developed a system that makes them easier to maintain and healthier over the long term.

For someone like me who loves plants and gardening, or for someone like my grandmother who knew that the trees around her in Brooklyn were just the tip of a verdant iceberg, Gennaro Brooks-Church has the ability to bring us all to a healthier space. And that's why I finally settled on the word verdure - when you look it up the first definition is lush, green vegetation, and the second, the fresh green color of vegetation. The third is a condition of freshness. Then you find greenness, especially of fresh, flourishing vegetation, and then freshness in general, flourishing condition, vigor. All of those things roll into the expression of health and well-being that you find in the spaces that Gennaro Brooks-Church creates, and as much of a language lover as I am, I also like the sound of the word and the echoes of ancient civilizations within its Latin roots. Verdure it is and because of its verdure it will stand, vigorously thriving and growing and bringing health and healing to us all.

Gennaro Brooks-Church

At Eco-Brooklyn

http://ecobrooklyn.com/