THE SECRET GARDEN

For his Spring 2007 Sarabande Collection, Alexander McQueen took the audience on a journey from bud to burial, using fresh flowers laced with cobwebs, as a beautifully macabre metaphor for the cycle of life. “Things rot” said McQueen… “I used flowers because they die. My mood was darkly romantic at the time...” A similar tale plucked from the garden and ending back in the soil can be seen in the evolution of The Woodlands, environmentalist William Hamilton’s 18th century Philadelphia botanical garden and state-of-the-art greenhouse. Hamilton, with the help of his friend and neighbor, seed dealer and published botanical artist William Bartram, created a garden of exotic plants from around the world, containing approximately 10,000 species of native, foreign, and rare flora at the height of its operations.

After helping usher in the Age of Enlightenment that eventually led to the discipline of botany, the wealthy collector’s land was saved from near extinction when it was transformed into a cemetery or “memory garden” nearly a century later. “We have a nineteenth-century cemetery superimposed on an eighteenth-century estate,” explains the Woodlands’ director… The land was metamorphosed to fit the needs of the popular rural cemetery movement, which emphasized romantic landscapes in contrast to the crowded churchyards of colonial America. Just as these garden graveyards were dedicated to creating peaceful sanctuaries outside the unsavory confines of the recently industrialized cities, perhaps the same could be said of McQueen’s collection… a fantastical escape from the decay of modern civilization… “McQueen’s interest in nature was normally of the wild kind and he rarely turned to the tamer realm of the English garden with its herbaceous borders and Edwardian glasshouses.” wrote Claire Wilcox… “However, here he secreted petals under chiffon, stuffed blossom into the gaping necks of ball gowns, formed headpieces of black roses and, for the finale, made a bouquet of a dress from frozen blooms. Fragile and wilting under the heat, the flowers dropped to the catwalk as the model circled the stage, leaving a perfumed trail...” • All Collages by Moi