The Secret Garden

After Everlite Grove, the question for the next year's retreat was what the grove could become if it stopped being an installation and started being a landscape.

A forest you move through rather than look at: winding paths, seating enclaves tucked between trees, and an environment designed to shift from snowbound winter to moss-covered spring — the seasons compressed into an evening.

I led the work end to end — creative direction, the expanded fabrication program, transport, installation, live operation, and strike, across two venues.

The grove's sixty fabricated birches were joined by roughly forty real trees and more than twenty new smaller builds, dressed in moss and snow, with illuminated rocks, branches, and leaf elements woven through. Pixel-mapped LED lighting ran AI-directed seasonal animations, and a generative spatial soundscape gave the forest a voice that never repeated itself.

Well over a hundred real and fabricated trees across two environments — the largest evolution yet of a living-light landscape we had been growing for two years.