We’re used to looking at gardens in all seasons, including winter dormancy. However, gardens spend at least half of their existence in the dark. What happens in a garden made for nighttime? Night Garden simulates darkness with a suspended fabric veil, and inverts the experience of garden viewing by casting everything in shadow.

Gardens are transformed by nighttime. By day, they feel cheerful, hot, overstimulating even; in darkness, the same spaces becomes colorless, reduced to pure forms and outlines, and with that can feel uncanny, perhaps even a bit eerie. There are phenomena that can only be experienced in a garden after dark—the flitting of a hummingbird moth, the diving of bats overhead; our senses are so heightened after hours that it’s possible to hear the rustling of their wings if one is listening closely enough.

Our exhibition asks the question: What happens in a garden that is purposefully created to be experienced at night? Or, said differently, why not create a garden with nighttime interest?

Night Garden announces itself with a large and imposing suspended black fabric veil in the shape of an ellipse, an astronomical archetype, whose engineering and design goes to our friend, architect David Moses. The exterior planting in the foreground of this drape is purposefully planted in deep, rich tones, to play up the juxtaposition of what’s on the other side: a soft, glowing celestial arabesque. The planting inside showcases a garden full of plants with evening fragrance, night time flowering, and visibility in low light conditions.

It seemed only natural to play with illumination given such a high octane design brief as The Garden Electric, the overarching theme of the 2023 show. Collaborators Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib‘s subtle lighting and moving projections cast a slow moving skyscape on the ceiling and planted surface of the exhibit to further set the scene. Visitors can view the garden from either of two nooks that allow them to step inside the walls of the drape and be encased in the experience of a garden designed to glow in the dark.

Images copyright 2023 Jaime Alvarez Photography

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