: Sigh : if only I had known about this dreamy magical haven in Venice, when I was there last year.

I think these are by far the most inspiring images that I’m going to lay my eyes upon all week.

This installation is called The Falling Garden and is housed in The Church of San Stae on the Grand Canal. ( Gosh! Writing this is enough to make me nostalgic about our honeymoon in Italy last year...)

This work of wonder is created by Swiss artists Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger. Here’s how the artists describe their installation on their website:

The Doge (Mocenigo) needed a church so as to be able to have a monumental tomb built for himself, the church (San Staë) needed a saint so as to be able to be built, the saint (San Eustachio) needed a miracle so as to be pronounced a saint, the miracle needed a stag in order to be seen, and we built the garden for the reindeer.

The visitors lie on the bed above the doge’s gravestone, and the garden thinks for them.

Components: Plastic berries (India), cow pads (Jura), waste paper (Venice), baobab seeds (Australia), beech, elder and magnolia branches (Uster), thorns (Almeria), nylon blossoms (one-dollar-shop), pigs’ teeth (Indonesia), seaweed (Seoul), orange peel (Migros shop), fertilizer crystals (home grown), pigeons’ bones (San Staë), silk buds (Stockholm), cattail (Ettiswil), cats’ tails (China), celery roots (Montreal), virility rind (Caribbean), wild bore quills (zoo), banana leaves (Murten), rubber snakes (Cincinnati)...

But why oh why didn’t I know about The Falling Garden before? What an experience it would have been to have walked through that exquisite white room or to have lied on that bed and drifted away into la la land!