The Desert Botanical Garden has a brand-new, vibrant, larger-than-life exhibit opening Oct. 9, 2026, and running all the way until May 31, 2027.
Super Bloom, which is by the duo known as Graphic Rewilding, takes what's beautiful and intricate about our unique desert blooms and expands them to showcase the otherworldly beauty of these unique plants and flowers.
For the past two years, Laura Best, senior director of exhibitions at the Desert Botanical Garden, has been working closely with Graphic Rewilding artists Lee Baker and Catherine Borowski to bring this exhibit to life.
"Their (Graphic Rewilding's) work is such a great fit and a really exciting thing we always get to do is just connect people to art and nature and it creates such a good dynamic
dialogue between what they're seeing happening with our plants in this really specific desert ecosystem and then what's happening with the work," said Best. "Super Bloom is celebrating so much of what we're about in our desert plant palette and the role pollinators play, but also visually it's just stunning."
Meet the duo behind the colorful new exhibit
Lee Baker and Catherine Borowski are on a mission to transform urban spaces with their nature-inspired immersive artworks. And while they call the U.K. home, for the last few years, Baker and Borowski have been immersing themselves in all that the desert has to offer.
The duo has worked with the staff at the Desert Botanical Garden along with botanical scientists to ensure that the art they create is authentic to the area.
"It's its own ecosystem that has to be respected in the drawings and the artwork," explained Baker. "We've worked really, really hard with everyone to make sure that every artwork is not just a kind of visually sumptuous thing, but it's an education as well."
Baker calls what he and Borowski do "microscopic maximalism" where they take these tiny flowers that you maybe would have never noticed and blow it up so it's massive and can't be missed.
"In a way, in this show, the flowers have chosen us, you know, and that could have been quite a struggle because cactus is beautiful, and aloe and all the other plants, but they're so different to anything we've drawn before."
What to expect from Super Bloom at Desert Botanical Garden
Super Bloom invites the community to get outdoors and connect with nature by stepping inside glass houses that radiate color and light or sit among the various floral blooms. There are more than 21 larger-than-life installations placed throughout the Garden that guests can immerse themselves in, with each looking different during the day and at night.
The Graphic Rewilding duo were meticulous when it came to designing a space for Super Bloom at DBG.
"Our work is extremely site-specific, and we always respond to the architecture and the infrastructure that's already there," said Baker.
On their first visit, Baker and Borowski used a lidar scanner to measure the distances between spaces and 3D scanned them. This allowed them to create 3D model and design pieces that fit into the spaces, rather than forcing an art installation to squeeze into an already-existing spot. Then, Baker got to work on drawing the flowers, which he describes as a meditative process despite how daunting the process of choosing the right colors.
"My God, hours and hours of testing and comparing and then you change that and then that's wrong, it's all about balance," said Baker. "When you're dealing with the kinds of colors that are crazy vibrant, color is comparative and everything's relative and quite often my decision making is around composition not around the actual flower colors."
Super Bloom isn't a direct recreation of the beautiful nature of the desert, instead it's how Baker and Borowski see it.
"I think that's why it resonates with people so immediately is because when you focus on that sense of feeling and not just this faithful reproduction of a botanical illustration of a flower, a plant, but has one foot in that it's informed by science, it's informed by observing what we're seeing. But ultimately I think Lee makes these aesthetic decisions based on his own style and what he wants to convey in that way and it's wonderful to see people be really drawn to that," said Best.
How to see the Super Bloom Art Exhibit at DBG
When: 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Oct. 9, 2026 - May 31, 2027.
Where: Desert Botanical Garden, 1201 N. Galvin Pkwy., Phoenix.
Admission: General admission is $34.95 for adults and $16.95 for youth. The Super Bloom exhibit is included in general admission.
Details: 480-941-1225, dbg.org.
Meredith G. White covers entertainment, art and culture for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. She writes the latest news about video games, television and best things to do in metro Phoenix.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Why giant, colorful flower art is taking over Desert Botanical Garden
