Ebony G Patterson uncovers the nightmare within the garden

Ah, the garden, locus of innocence, nourishment and gladness. In the Old Testament, Eden is the ideal gated community, mild and self-contained. In The Odyssey, Alcinous’s realm teems with “pears and pomegranates and apple-trees with their bright fruit, and sweet figs, and luxuriant olives. Of these the fruit perishes not nor fails in winter or in summer, but lasts throughout the year.”

The New York Botanical Garden is a contemporary version of those mythological enclaves, the airy antithesis to the city that enfolds it. Inside are azalea walks and rose bowers. Outside are the fume-hazed roadways of the Bronx. It’s an improbable oasis, a deluxe gift to harried urbanites, where jumbled masses from many nations can pause for a few hours and drift through mottled green light.

A garden isn’t nature, exactly. It’s a curated place, removed from everyday torments, suffused with divine grace and moulded by exacting labour. (Just ask anyone with pruning shears and an edging tool.) Unlike pure wilderness, it’s a cultural artefact that relies on human creative power, and with that taming comes corruption. Fecund beauty can hide decadence and predation.

Ebony G Patterson’s multi-part installation, scattered through the Botanical Garden grounds, delicately reminds us of those more sinister inclinations. “ . . . things come to thrive . . . in the shedding . . . in the molting . . . ” is a lush ode to death. Hundreds of darkly effulgent foam vultures stand around like spies among the verdure, looking busy. At first, you might pick out one or two. Then, alert to their presence, you notice dozens, bending, pecking, diving headlong into the flora. They mass into sinister committees among velvety coleuses, tall pink foxgloves and bright-red petunias.

A wake of vultures doesn’t inspire happy thoughts. We reflexively perceive them as repellent, with their long coiling necks, broad dark feathers and nasty flesh-tearing beaks. Their hideousness conjures up the mortality they thrive on — not as killers but as consumers of death. But Patterson would like us to reconsider those prejudices.

“It is sad that vultures get a bad rap,” she said recently. “They come as an act of love.” Far from unleashing omens, she claims to have loosed these scavengers on the garden to redeem them. Like worms and maggots, they transform ends into new beginnings. They take the job that no one else wants.

Patterson sings the praises of these maligned creatures: a text panel informs us that vultures are exceptionally social, monogamous and loyal family birds that care for their young long after they are fledged. They are generous, too: by removing dead animals from our midst and cleansing the land of harmful bacteria, they heal the landscape.

To persuade us of their beatific role, Patterson exaggerates their handsomeness, trimming her sculptures with glitter that sparkles in the sunlight, and streamlining them into figures of elegant grace. She stretches her case a little too thin for my taste; I can’t fall in love with a bird that spends its life circling above the doomed, patiently waiting for them to become dinner. And yet, in spite of the species’ foibles, here among the foliage, these prettied-up effigies become an unnatural delight.

Patterson’s not done revising nature. A translucent peacock dominates the entrance to the glassed-in Conservatory. Forget the imperial associations and showy displays of plumage, though: we get a shaggy, rather plebeian-looking specimen caught in mid-moulting. It’s not pretty, but then all creatures go through an awkward stage. Splendour is still in the offing.

Surrounded by the Botanical Garden’s consoling tumult, it’s hard to remember that such profusion is the product of hard work and skilled contrivance. The monumental efforts of horticulturalists, landscape architects, gardeners and groundskeepers are most successful when they disappear, leaving only anonymous loveliness. That same confusion between nature and artifice exists at the global level, too: fate and hubris have put humans in charge of maintaining our whole green planet, and we’re botching that job, leaving our signature all too visible.

That, surely, is why Patterson has resurrected extinct plant species in ghostly glass sculptures that spring from beds of living flowers. With their pale stems and translucent leaves, they stand in as life-sized, bonelike monuments to disappearance, and to the planet’s dwindling biodiversity. Nobody cheers for extinction but, with a kind of contrarian optimism, Patterson reminds us that such catastrophes keep recurring over the aeons, as decay and loss make way for fresh forms of life. (Unfortunately, in the Anthropocene, the process has drastically accelerated, outpacing the evolution of new species.)

The exhibition continues in the Mertz Library Building with a series of riotous, baroque collages constructed of cut-up and torn botanical illustrations. Resembling funeral wreaths or high-relief church decor, they are sombrely exuberant, with darkness winking through the dazzle. Like Nick Cave’s flamboyant “Soundsuits”, they’re merry and scary, enticingly colourful, good-naturedly kitschy and resoundingly nightmarish.

Perhaps you’ve had the classic dream in which you approach an exquisite animal in the woods only to find it’s a reeking corpse crawling with worms. Here, that nightmare bursts into daytime hours. Celebratory blooms hide cockroaches and scorpions. Bouquets are bedecked by flies. Snakes slither everywhere, reminding us (as if we could forget) that a serpent’s place is in the garden. At the same time, we’re also invited to reflect that, though we endow such reptiles with evil intent, they’re just performing their assigned task in the ecosystem and in mythology. They also serve who only slither and lurk.

There’s a moralising, warning undertone to the whole installation, and that becomes explicit in the centrepiece beneath the rotunda. On entering the room, you pass a rack of sumptuous damasks and brocades, rich with flowers and vines. All is luxury and voluptuous calm. The exhibition route guides visitors past the other side of that installation, a wall of infernal, grasping hands and blackened, withered stalks. At that point, the conclusion becomes unavoidable: this may be a garden of pleasure, but it offers no hope of real escape.

To October 22, nybg.org