The Carbon Garden

Back in July, I attended The Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival, an event that gave me just the tiniest taste of what Burning Man might be like. In an empty lot in an industrial section of Oakland, a number of artists had installed pieces of varying sizes, all of which featured some form of interaction with fire.

Inside the cab of a snail-shaped vehicle called The Golden Mean, a little girl’s face sparkled with astonishment as she pulled a lever that caused fire to shoot out of the snail’s eyes. Across the lot, patrons tried their hand at Matisse Enzer’s Flamethrower Shooting Gallery.

And somewhere in between, I came upon a version of False Profit Labs’ Carbon Garden. Shoulder-height flowers, graceful and tough, curved up from the lot’s surface, spitting fire into the night air.

Can you imagine? A garden that doesn’t even require watering? Sounds like about the most perfect garden for a horticultural klutz like me.

The first night I was on the Playa at Burning Man, my friend Fatemeh and I ran across the same garden, still under construction, and this time, clearly laid out on a much bigger scale than the version I’d seen in Oakland.

It wasn’t firing yet, but later in the week, I found it again, blooming in the desert night air, with residents of Black Rock City wandering through it. Now there were not only the shoulder-height flowers, but ones that soared overhead, as well.

On my last day on the Playa, I rode out with a new friend to the garden. It took awhile to get there—the dust was kicking up and we had to stop over and over again to shield our eyes from the storm. But it was haunting, even in daytime, even when not spitting fire. In daylight, the flowers curved up from the lakebed, the carbon steel twisted and dusty. But despite of…and perhaps because of…all that had happened over the course of the week, the garden was more beautiful than ever.