Lily Kwong Celebrates New York Fauna

This summer, the landscape artist Lily Kwong has combined her urban planning and design prowess to create an immersive installation in Madison Square Park that urges visitors to contemplate New York’s diverse and disappearing plant life.

Created in partnership with Madison Square Park Conservancy, Gardens of Renewal is a two-part project that emphasizes the ecological potential of urban spaces—and the urgent threat climate change poses to its indigenous plants.

“Urban spaces like NYC have a profound responsibility and opportunity to become stewards of ecological healing,” says Kwong. “With Gardens of Renewal, I’m exploring how the built environment can be more than just a container for human life; it can be a canvas for reconnection, a portal into deeper relationships with the natural world.”

Spanning two separate sections across the park’s Redbud and Sparrow lawns, the installation features both a Meditation Garden and a Children’s Garden. The former is a spiral pathway dotted with indigenous species like evening primroses, purple pitcher plants, and cardinal flowers. As visitors approach the spiral’s center, the plants become rarer, and therefore more vulnerable to climate change’s threats. The labyrinth-like design serves as both a respite from the surrounding city as well as an opportunity to ruminate on our interconnectivity with nature.

The Children’s Garden includes a stage, library, and play structure situated among an array of vibrant blooms like bee balm and columbine. The multisensory experience allows young visitors to play among the plants while inspiring them to consider and connect with the natural world.

In addition to the installation’s many natural elements, visitors can also access QR codes within the park that offer field guides, a meditation session, and a customized playlist.

Kwong brought Gardens of Renewal to life over the course of two years alongside the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s separate horticulture and art teams. She says the two teams relished the opportunity to work together and helped enthusiastically to bring her multifaceted vision to life. She also emphasized the importance of spotlighting the city’s native plant species in the installation. “In most modern gardens and public spaces, the planting palette often leans heavily exotic or ornamental,” Kwong explains. “By using native plants, public spaces could not only be creating greenspace but a vital habitat for the more-than-human world.”

Kwong’s time as a student at the New York Botanical Garden, and at Columbia University, where she majored in urban studies, helped foster her love of New York’s green spaces. She has since created many dynamic botanical works around the city, including an ethereal hanging garden for the High Line, an Orcadian landscape in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall, and a 2023 exhibition for the Botanical Garden’s annual orchid show.

Through her landscape design firm Studio Lily Kwong, she expertly entwines different mediums and her many points of view to bring people closer to nature’s beauty. “Blending areas of study like urban planning or design with my arts practice feels like weaving together the analytical and the intuitive,” she says. “I think deeply about how infrastructure, policy, and land use shape our lives, but my artistic practice allows me to express emotion, the subconscious, and explore the sacred. In my practice and especially this project, these disciplines are in constant dialogue. By integrating ecological research with a sensory, emotional experience, I aim to create spaces that can be sites for ecological and cultural healing.”

She also hopes that her work appeals to people’s emotions when it comes to considering climate change—and that her current installation serves as an act of resistance in an era when vital public spaces are disappearing. “Artists have a vital role to play in this moment of environmental crisis. Data and science alone do not shift culture—throughout history, it’s been artists and creators that have imagined new worlds and ignited cultural change,” she explains. “I see this creative path I’m on as a form of ecological offering—a way to grieve, remember, and pray for a new future. In a time of disconnection and collapse, art has the power to help us feel rooted again and guided back into relationship with the living world.”

Bringing the cycle of renewal full circle, Kwong has ensured that after the installation’s end, its greenery won’t be discarded but rather replanted in the park as well as nearby tree pits and planters, offering joy to future generations of New Yorkers.

Gardens of Renewal is on view through September 1 at Madison Square Park, New York.