OF A’s dark botanical landscape ‘slow dream’ seems to float at chelsea flower show
a garden lifted into object form
With Slow Dream, OF A brings a dark botanical landscape into the Great Pavilion at the Chelsea Flower Show 2026, where the garden appears to rise from the floor as a living object. Presented from May 19th to 23rd, the installation marks the second expression in the studio’s ongoing OF A GARDEN series, following Moon Garden, first shown during Frieze Week London 2025.
OF A works across objects, environments, exhibitions, and landscapes. With this series, the studio, founded by Ralu Emandi and Laura Lim Sam, treats the garden as a sculptural body.
images © Edmund Sumner
slow dream at chelsea flower show 2026
At this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, OF A‘s Slow Dream imagines a botanical terrain shaped by burning, growth, and renewal. Blackened forms suggest volcanic matter and fertile soil, while dense shadow-like planting moves away from decorative floral display toward something closer to a landscape held in suspension.
The installation’s strength lies in that tension between object and environment. Its charred surfaces carry a sense of heat and aftermath, while the planting reads as silhouette, trace, and imprint. Within the Great Pavilion, that makes the work feel spatial before it feels floral, closer to a constructed terrain than a conventional garden stand.
Slow Dream imagines a botanical terrain shaped by burning, growth, and renewal
from ground plane to living form
OF A describes the project as part of a broader investigation into the ‘garden as object.’ In practical terms, that means the garden is treated as a thing with volume, edge, texture, and presence. It can sit in a room, shape an atmosphere, and shift the viewer’s sense of scale without behaving like a miniature landscape.
There is an architectural idea running through the piece. Slow Dream turns planting into a material system, placing botanical life in conversation with surface treatment and spatial composition. The garden becomes something built and grown at once, its dark palette giving the installation a compressed, almost geological weight.
blackened forms suggest volcanic matter and fertile soil
a darker reading of botanical space by of a
That darkness gives the project its identity. Instead of the bright abundance often associated with the CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW, OF A works with shadow, burn marks, and mineral texture. The effect is intimate and slightly strange, as if the garden has passed through fire and entered another phase of growth.
Slow Dream also speaks to a wider shift in how gardens are being read within design culture. Here, the garden becomes a cultural object, a spatial proposal, and a way to think about transformation. OF A’s approach suggests that botanical environments can hold memory and mood while still operating through material precision.
dense shadow-like planting suggests a landscape held in suspension
charred surfaces carry a sense of heat and aftermath, while the plantings read as silhouette
the work feels spatial before it feels floral
the project as part of a broader investigation into the ‘garden as object’
the garden is treated as a thing with volume, edge, texture, and presence
project info:
name: Slow Dream
event: Chelsea Flower Show 2026
dates: May 19th to 23rd
studio founders: Ralu Emandi, Laura Lim Sam
photography: © Edmund Sumner | @edmundsumner
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