On a beautiful October Saturday morning, with shorts and T-shirts being the predominant seasonal-appropriate fashion among the throngs on the Strip, an eye-opening display enraptures those traversing Bellagio’s Conservatory & Botanical Gardens. A fresh fall fragrance is picked up by olfactory senses as thousands of yellow, orange and brown blooms come into view. Fog rises from the water flowing alongside the bridge leading to a roundabout in the middle of the conservatory, where a touchable hyrdroglobe is mounted at center.
The team behind the seasonal displays always tries to outdo the last endeavor, but Artfully Autumn has an unprecedented, captivating effect on witnesses. It wakes people up, drawing exclamations and smiles. “Oh, look!” can be heard more than once, and one onlooker in a pack of pedestrians reacts by thumping his chest at heart level twice, followed up with a joyful, “This makes me feel good!”
There is a lot going on, including homages to design masters amid oversized cattails rising from the water, complemented by giant acorns and real pumpkins that reach up to more than 1,000 pounds in weight.
Photo by: Vanessa Rogers
Morning sun shines through the Tiffany glass of the display’s pièce de resistance, a waterfall sculpture with a fairy floating above it that provides a visual appetizer for the long line of guests waiting to get into Sadelle’s Café for brunch. It’s designer Ed Libby’s tribute to Vortex, the world’s tallest indoor waterfall at Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore. A gorgeous infinity waterfall basin absorbs the falling water.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater home in Pennsylvania inspired the installation in the conservatory’s south bed. The scaled-down replica seems suspended in air as macro-sized dragonflies that Louis Comfort Tiffany would have envied flutter in a scene set with 32,000 orange carnations. The adjacent east bed features 20-foot-tall gilded archways with vibrant, multicolored flowers creating a smooth transition to the surroundings.
The aroma is Libby’s “cornucopia” fragrance that blends orange and cranberry with notes of rich cinnamon, triggering memories of apple cider antidotes to cool fall evenings. Copper-hued bonsai trees set in colorful floral bases complement the calming effects of the scent, while an LED screen provides ambient scenes of waterfalls and falling leaves.
Water used in Bellagio’s Conservatory and Botanical Gardens is drawn, reused and repurposed from on-site underground wells. It hydrates 31 types of plant species included in Artfully Autumn, fuels the waterfalls and cleans the tiles that command the attention of one preschooler following the maze-like curling vines designed into the floor. He traces the spiral until he reaches the center and raises his hands in triumph, unaware of the fairy floating above watching over the beds, the blooms, the bonsai, and the art and architecture that inspired the latest installation to top all previous installations.
Bellagio , 702.693.7111
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