This Park Recreates Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ With a Dazzling Display of Plants, Trees and Winding Pathways

Ever look at Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and wish you could step into the wondrous swirling landscape? A new park in Bosnia and Herzegovina hopes to make that dream a reality by turning the beloved painting into a three-dimensional verdant space with colorful bushes and winding footpaths.

The idea began in 2018, when Bosnian businessman Halim Zukic was landscaping a plot of land near his hometown of Visoko. He had owned the land for more than a decade, and he had been planning to turn it into a retreat space, as he tells Forbes’ Leslie Katz.

Then, he noticed tractor marks in a meadow that reminded him of the celebrated van Gogh painting. A light bulb went off, and Zukic decided that he would replicate the painting with his own land as the canvas.

“Construction machinery served as our brushes, and our colors were plants,” he tells Forbes. “Throughout the space, there is not a single straight line.”

Zukic purchased more land and hired a team of roughly two dozen gardeners. Recently, he completed his vision—a 25-acre replica of van Gogh’s beloved 1889 painting. Dubbed the “Starry Night park,” the space is part of a larger 172-acre retreat that celebrates central Bosnia’s cultural heritage.

“This is the largest representation of The Starry Night, and the result of 20 years of dreams, of living those dreams to make them real,” he tells Reuters’ Daria Sito-sucic.

Van Gogh’s original painting hangs in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The artist created the now-iconic image while living at an asylum in southern France, one year before he died by suicide.

“Van Gogh assigned an emotional language to night and nature that took them far from their actual appearances,” MoMA writes of the piece.

Zukic and his team spent years trying to capture van Gogh’s visual language. They added footpaths, expanded streams into lakes and planted thousands of trees. They also brought in 130,000 lavender bushes to replicate the painting’s swirling features and added aromatic herbs like chamomile, echinacea, sage and wormwood.

The park is scheduled to open in May 2025. While some colors may look muted in an aerial view, “up close they have a vibrancy that echoes the brilliant blues and yellows of van Gogh’s painting,” according to Forbes. Additionally, some of the park’s plants and trees still need time to mature.

“Having money is not enough,” Zukic tells Agence France-Presse. “You need time for a park.”

He adds: “Inspired by the painting, we tried to stick to the shapes and proportions, so that it looks like the painting as much as possible—and I think we succeeded.”

Julia Binswanger | READ MORE

Julia Binswanger is a freelance arts and culture reporter based in Chicago. Her work has been featured in WBEZ, Chicago magazine, Rebellious magazine and PC magazine.