The Secret Garden
Cheekwood Botanical Gardens
Nashville, Tennessee
Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art selected DA|AD to create an installation inspired by The Secret Garden for their 2007 Summer Exhibition. The exhibit’s theme “Once Upon a Garden,” focused on the magical world of classic children’s stories. Extracting several experiences from the book, the unique assemblage can be both experienced and perceived as a garden. DA|AD designed and constructed the installation themselves.
From a bird’s eye view, the exhibit is composed of two converging walls that enter a 30’ cylinder. Each wall has a varying degree of opacity. One wall stretches 70’ in length and is 3-feet thick. This wall is fabricated as a “gabian” wall and filled with tree branches to create an organic transparency screen. The second wall is a series of doors painted in descending shades of green and wrapped with red scaffolding mesh. One half of the interior wall surface of the cylinder is clad with vintage botanical illustrations of indigenous flowers mentioned specifically in the book. These images were printed on a translucent polycarbonate, adding another layer of translucency to the enclosure. The other half of the interior wall surface is clad with a mirror finish stainless steel. This creates a distorted reflection of the wall of flowers, adding yet another layer of perceived translucency to the experience.
