Lily Kwong Used 13,000 Flowers to Transform New York’s High Line Into a Hanging Garden of Delights (2024)

On any given evening in New York City, there are hundreds—maybe thousands?—of events. While many are entertaining, few have the power to truly mesmerize. But on Wednesday night, in the Chelsea Market Passage of the city’s High Line, St-Germain and model-turned-landscape designer and creative director Lily Kwong did just that by transforming the already gorgeous public space into a veritable hanging garden of botanical delights. Guests wandered among living garden walls arranged like a 16th-century French labyrinth, while canopies of lush blooms floated overhead. There was also a breathtaking modern dance performance by Mafalda Millies and an array of beautifully adorned St-Germain co*cktails to provide further sensory delight.

“The High Line made me fall in love with urban planning and landscape design—to me, it’s a masterpiece,” explained Kwong of the inspiration behind the installation and event. “I wanted to honor the existing industrial architecture of the site. It felt important to visualize the mind-blowing fact that each bottle of St-Germain is composed of 1,000 delicate elderflowers that are handpicked once a year in Europe, so we hand-constructed a hanging installation of thousands of flowers modeled after rolling hills that interplay with the existing neon lighting. Every design element is meant to disorient, delight, and inspire an awe for nature on the summer solstice.”

Below, Kwong shares insight into how the installation (which will remain on view until tonight) came together, as well as a few tips to steal for your own summer soirees.

“We brought more than 13,000 flowers to the High Line and hand-constructed them into beautiful curtains and grids, inspired by a vintage photo I found of a cabaret with hanging florals on the Champs-Élysées from the 1920s. We started working with the amazing florists from Botanica weeks before the event to source peonies, Queen Anne’s lace, hydrangeas, roses, wisteria, delphinium, ranunculus, viburnum, lilies, and more. The green walls are handmade with cuttings from boxwood and huckleberries (which happens to be my brother’s name!). Insanely enough, we only had from midnight before the event to load our florals onto the High Line, and construction began just 12 hours before the event, so the blooms were as fresh as possible. It took a sleepless night and lots of fortitude to turn this vision into a reality!”

“The green walls are handmade with cuttings from boxwood and huckleberries (which happens to be my brother’s name!). Insanely enough, we only had from midnight before the event to load our florals onto the High Line, and construction began just 12 hours before the event, so the blooms were as fresh as possible. It took a sleepless night and lots of fortitude to turn this vision into a reality!”

“I work in a male-dominated field, and it’s part of my mission to collaborate with other female creatives. I first came across the work of artistic director Mafalda Millies this winter at Mana Contemporary, where the Performa Visionaries was hosting a performance she had worked on in collaboration with curator Roya Sachs.”

“The piece honestly moved me to tears! I am interested in using landscape as a vehicle to explore other art forms and wanted to collaborate with Mafalda to layer the plant life with original choreography and music. The Solar-Do-Nothing-Dance was born! The summer solstice performance pays homage to one of the first devices to convert solar energy to electricity: Charles and Ray Eames’s Solar-Do-Nothing Machine (1957). Suspended above the bustling New York street life, dancers donning structural, wheel-like costumes bring to life the spinning, sparkling and intrinsically playful Eames toy through dance, music, and design.”

“I connected to Roots of Peace through my friend Kyleigh Kühn, who is the organization’s marketing director. RoP is a humanitarian nonprofit turning mines to vines by replacing land mines with vineyards and orchards worldwide. It was important to me that the plant life used in our installation be recycled and find a good home after the Maison St-Germain debut. Beyond its incredible work worldwide, when I found out the organization sponsored the Isaiah Wall at the United Nations, it was a no-brainer to create an event and donate the leftover florals to the symbolic institution. Kyleigh and I were inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love and tapped our friends—poet Cleo Wade, Cheerie Lane’s Kate Greer, the Yoga for Bad People founders, and sustainable textile company Piece & Co.—to come together for a celebration of peace and community. Additionally, as an extension of our remarkable collaboration, St-Germain has made a generous donation toward Roots of Peace’s mission of beautifying and breathing life into riddled areas around the world.”

“For my recent birthday, my best childhood girlfriends created a mandala for me out of wildflowers after a hike to the beach. A mandala is an abstract design, usually circular in form. It’s symbolically powerful; in Tibetan Buddhism, a mandala is an offering to the entire universe! You can use your intuition to arrange florals into a geometric shape, playing with textures and colors. It’s a moving exercise with a beautiful result and could be a great centerpiece for a garden gathering. I believe in the biophilia hypothesis—which suggests humans possess an innate desire to connect with nature. Why do people love flowers? Because it’s in our DNA.”

“Camille Ralph Vidal, the St-Germain global brand ambassador, created a co*cktail called the Labyrinthe, which features bright kaffir lime flavors for summer. The inspiration behind the drink came from the French maze entrance leading up to the maison. The goal of the maze was to usher people into a new, extraordinary reality: a world where flowers burst from the ceiling, dancers reflect the sun, and every turn offers a new surprise. Similarly, the co*cktail is a journey for the senses. You can taste the fruity notes of the fresh elderflower blossoms, but the chartreuse verte gives the drink a kind of herbal quality. With the dry vermouth wine notes, everything about Camille’s creation is fresh and unexpected. I love how plant-based and pure our co*cktail is; it feels like it reflects my aesthetic.”