For me, the story of the Neomachi Garden, a concept garden designed to exist within a conceptual city, begins when I was a teenager reading The Best of Omni Science Fiction no. 6, an anthology of short stories published in 1983. Those futuristic and alien worlds, such as William Gibson's "the Sprawl", would go on to inform my ideas and design style for the rest of my life, making it no surprise that the cyberpunk apparel of visionary Rosalie Mellström, and the immersive retrofuturistic world she has created around it, inspired me to imagine the garden that might exist within the city of Neomachi.
My interpretation of Rosalie's vision, which was inspired by the neon lights of Japan, is based on an ultra-minimal colour palette of neon green and neon pink, against a backdrop of grey urban materials: stone, steel and concrete. The entire garden is mirrored along the diagonal to create a mindbending kaleidoscopic effect, evoking the iconic reflections of neon city imagery, the otherworldly multiverses of science fiction, and the feeling of stepping through the looking-glass into Rosalie's virtual world. This kaleidoscopic geometry is outlined by neon LED strip lights, turning the garden into a cybernetic-organism with green light flowing through its botanical circuitry like the life-force of nature flows through the veins of a leaf.
Throughout the long winter nights, the seedhead spires of Dispacus fullonum and Phlomis tuberosa are bathed in a neon-green glow, as they rise from between domes of evergreen foliage. Then, as the expanding daylight hours of summer melt away the darkness of winter, the garden undergoes its seasonal metamorphosis and those dense beds of native and pollinator-friendly planting burst into neon-pink bloom, like the strange meadows of another world glowing under an alien sun.