Getting to work on a project at the SFBG was a straight-from-heaven dream. I got to be project manager and lead on this while employed at Lutsko Associates in San Francisco, working alongside 
Ron Lutsko, Andrea Kovol, Myra Messner and Rafael Tiffany. The Celebration Garden was conceived 
to be a magical event space for garden lunches, weddings and more. The garden needed a way 
to make money to support the wider botanic garden.

This 1.5 acre garden was already home to special landscape interventions, most notably a Thomas Church pavilion. We saved as much as we could. SFBG wanted to make a garden experience that no other botanic garden could have — so we capitalized on the SF coastal fog climate to emulate a tropical cloud-forest. The plantings are meant to channel Fern Gully, but in a low-maintenance, high-impact sort of way.

You enter the garden into a cocktail lounge under palms and big old maytens, with the Thomas Church pavilion in the distance. Then you move through 
to the main event lawn, which is encircled in cloud 
forest. Two distinct canopy layers of palm trees 
will emerge in time, the lower one providing a human-scale canopy, and the other a more magical scale canopy. The garden has been busy with events since getting planted!

Design by Lutsko Associates in collaboration with Mathew Stephens and Ryan Guillou at SFBG.

Site work and concrete by Dryco. Landscape planting by SFBG.