From the archive
11 Aug 2026
On the evening of 30 May, with the moon full, a small group sat on the veranda of a former Belgian pavilion in an Amsterdam park and took turns reading aloud. The texts were about caves, subterranean ecosystems, light pollution, and the moths and bats that pollinate after sunset. Around them, inside whitewashed walls, was the Shadow Garden, with evening primrose, sage and tall grasses among its plantings, all going dark by degrees.
The site has a layered history. The park hosted the Floriade of 1972, a world horticultural exhibition that gathered plants from across the globe into one place, and the Shadow Garden was once the monastery garden of the Belgian pavilion. Since 2021 it has been kept by Zone2Source, an art-and-ecology testing ground, working with the Onkruidenier, an artist collective made up of Jonmar van Vlijmen and Ronald Boer. Their question, pursued over years rather than an evening, is how people might tend a garden as a shared environment rather than a possession.
This was the second Gardener's Assembly, run with cultural worker Anne Diestelkamp as part of a wider Amsterdam network that grew out of a 2024 exhibition on gardening as artistic practice. The nocturnal programme ended with food: artistic researcher Chen Zhou built an edible landscape of four-coloured jellies, each layer standing for a stratum of ground - newly planted trees, an artificial topsoil under moss, buried concrete left by a cement works. Soil as something you could spoon up and taste.
None of this produced a harvest, and it was not meant to. What it produced was a group of people sitting in a walled garden after dark, noticing what the daylight version of gardening usually misses: the moths working the flowers, the bats over the grass, the ground cooling underfoot. It is a small thing. But the exchange network it belongs to is now in its second year, and the gardens it meets in need hands as well as readers.
Take a torch you never switch on and sit in a garden, yours or a shared one, for the hour around dusk on a bright moon night. Note what moves: moths at the evening primrose, bats over the grass. It costs nothing, and one evening is enough to change when you water, when you mow, and whether you leave the outdoor light off.
Makery · Read the source