CELEBRATION GARDEN AT
SF BOTANIC GARDEN
PUBLIC
2020
Landscape Design by Lutsko Associates in collaboration with Mathew Stephens and Ryan Guilou at SFBG
Site work and conrete by Dryco
Planting installation by SFBG
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!