Incredible Gardens Growing in Unexpected Places | The Weather Channel
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These photos will make you rethink your gardening strategy.

ByAshleigh Schmitz MorleyMarch 22, 2016



It's common to see gardens beautifully landscaped on lavish estates or expertly planned in botanical gardens, but some of the most inventive are in unexpected places. Don't let their beauty fool you, though. No matter where they're located, gardens can wreak havoc on the immune system of allergy sufferers. 

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Take inspiration this spring from the engineers and designers who have pushed the envelope and put gardens and greenery in places like the York Minster Cathedral in England and an underground bank vault in Japan. The possibilities for your green thumb are limitless when you think outside the garden bed. Just be sure to plan your garden with these plants that are less likely to provoke pollen allergies.

(ALLERGY TRACKER: See what's impacting your allergies

For part of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012, the York Minster Cathedral hosted a fundraising dinner for more than 900 guests. To make the event special, the church laid more than 16,000 square feet of real grass in the nave. Priests and other cathedral staff pitched in to mow the grass for the event.

In London, the Garden Bridge Trust is designing a new footbridge over the River Thames to be "an enchanted space in the middle of the busy city." The trust began working on the design in 2013 and construction is slated to begin this spring in order for the bridge to open in 2018. Garden bridge designers and engineers want the finished product to be a place "where people will fall back in love with traveling by foot."

(MORE: 101 Most Colorful Places on Earth)

In 2005, The Pasona Group transformed six rooms in an underground bank vault in Tokyo to an urban farm called Pasona O2. The garden, which was open for four years and operated by unemployed people, occupied 10,000 square feet. While it was operating, Pasona O2 used artificial light in place of natural sunlight to grow more than 100 different kinds of produce. The temperature in the space was controlled by computers and were sprayed with fertilizer and carbon dioxide. When it was open, over 70,000 people visited the underground farm and participated in seminars and lectures about the importance of farming and agriculture.

The Ampersand building in London's Soho neighborhood unveiled The Living Staircase in May 2005. Designed by Paul Cocksedge, The Living Staircase features relaxation areas on each floor and a "flying" garden on the stair railing. "If a staircase is essentially about going from A to B, there is now a whole world living and breathing in the space between the two," Cocksedge said in a statement about the project. 

(MORE: All the Garden Party Inspiration You Could Ever Need)

Stateside, the High Line is an open-air garden park designed on an out-of-use railway and one of New York City's most popular destinations for tourists and city dwellers alike. The last train ran on the High Line in 1980 and in the year 2000, planning for the development of the park in its current form began. By September 2014 the High Line had approximately 5 million annual visitors. 

In addition to visiting a garden for a moment of Zen, you can wear a garden in the form of a necklace, bracelet, earrings or ring thanks to living jewelry designer Susan McLeary. The Michigan-based designer's pieces made of live succulents are available on Etsy and are popular for weddings and other events. 

With a vision of a greener future, Los Angeles-based sculptor Stephen Glassman has an ambitious plan to create "suspended bamboo cloud forests" out of billboards. Glassman's project, Urban Air, received the London International Creativity Award in 2011 and has since created a prototype and a kit that can transform existing billboards into an "urban forest." Urban Air has already reached its $100,000 goal on Kickstarter. The ultimate goal is to use these green billboards as a platform for a social conversation around sustainability and climate awareness.