No plans to cover Eiffel Tower with plants

An engineering company says it's preparing plans to blanket the Eiffel Tower in live plants, but Paris City Hall has denied it will happen.

In a statement, city hall said it "refutes the existence of any project to vegetalise" the iconic monument.

Wednesday's statement dismissed as "lacking substance" a report in the Le Figaro daily that said Ginger engineering company is working on a plan to hang the tower with 600,000 plants for four years.

The report said the company is testing its design on a small model.

Contacted by The Associated Press, officials with Ginger insisted the report is true and that the project is under way. Company officials emphasised it would be financed by corporate sponsors — not public funds.

Earlier, Le Figaro newspaper reported on Wednesday that the Eiffel Tower could be transformed into the world's largest tree if a project to cover the iconic structure's 327-metre height with plants comes to fruition.

Engineering group Ginger, specialised in "green" architecture, has spent two years working on the 72-million-euro (96-million-dollar) project that would see 600,000 plants attached to the tower, the French daily reported.

Architects and engineers have already built a prototype several metres tall to assess the effect of the additional 378 tonnes weight on the structure. The results of the tests are expected to be known in December.

Seedlings would then be cultivated until June next year, which would be placed on the structure until January 2013. The plants would then grow until January 2014 and be left there until their removal in July 2016.

The plants would be placed in bags of soil hanging from hemp ropes attached to the tower's steel structure.  Twelve tonnes of rubber piping would irrigate the vegetation.

The project would produce 84.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide but the plants would absorb 87.8 tonnes, rendering the plan "carbon negative".

And the project will also not replace the electric lights that have adorned the Eiffel Tower since 2002, which instead will simply shine through the leaves with a greener hue, the paper said.