A Garden of Gizmos is available for rent for $10,000 per month, plus incoming shipping.
Call or e-mail now to reserve your time in the garden: Clifford@scienceinteractives.com
or (413) 441-0447.
Welcome to a garden like no other, with fantastic flowers, plants and creatures that your guests will love. The environment is created by 19 large and small hands-on interactives, surrounded by beautiful murals. Adults are just as engaged as their kids are, leading to great parent-child interactions. The Garden works best for kids ages two and older.
28 panels, painted by artists Robert Stone and Roppei Matsumoto, surround A Garden of Gizmos, with murals of giant flowers in the foreground: sunflowers, jasmine, edelweiss and tulips and rolling hills in the distance. Coming out of one part of the mural is the Bead Stream. Shake the handle back and forth, and streams of beads form beautiful wave patterns on the eight-foot-long slanted surface. The stream ends at the carpet pond surrounding the Rope Fountain, six symmetrical loops of rope constantly thrown into the air, their angle and height controlled by one visitor-activated joystick.
Like any garden, A Garden of Gizmos is filled with flowers. Vary the speed and watch what happens when a whole field of Spring Flowers sway and bounce.
Turn the crank, and the Blooming Rainflower, a giant flower made from 13 sunflower umbrellas, grows taller than you are, and then blooms. After 15 seconds of full bloom, a motor takes over and the Rainflower wilts back to sleep, ready to bloom for the next guest.
Snapdragons flick their fingers to the snappy music © composed and played by Paul Jost.
Control the speed of the swaying Dancing Wallflowers and envy how flexible their stems are.
Sunflowers play at the beach under the bright light of the sun until you activate the motor. The sun sets, the moon comes up and the scene rotates to reveal beautiful glowing Moonflowers asleep in their flowerbeds.
The Foxglove Zoetrope spins to reveal a mini-movie: a fox trotting into the picture, rummaging through a bureau, finding and putting on a glove, and finally, turning into a fully three dimensional flower. The Folded Flower Farm is an amazing totally origami ffarm by artist Jay Ansill, providing inspiration for programs by host institutions.
The Kitchen Garden is rows of ridged pillows that make a farm where kids can plant and harvest carrots, potatoes and other soft sculpture veggies. It presents information about organic farming and the importance of buying locally grown food—for environmental reasons, and because it usually tastes better!
A single sliding knob controls the rate and direction of time in Sprouts, a time lapse movie that shows a variety of things growing in a single big windowbox. This includes a variety of real plants, and Clifford Wagner’s hair! When the slider is all the way to the left, the first thing that appears in the empty window box is a bald head. Slide the control to the right, and Clifford’s hair grows along with the plants. This provides a real-world, very silly measure of how long it takes plants—and hair—to grow. Flowers bloom and die, chia pets grow green fur and move around, the world outside goes from snow to summer to snow, as Clifford’s hair grows long and shaggy.
A Garden of Gizmos has a number of creatures too. In Groundhogs’ Ground, control a groundhog that passes under your feet and then pops up in another corner, only to disappear again back under a bunch of flowers, making them sway. By turning the crank that moves the groundhog around, you can play games with other visitors.
Work the big cranks in Birdland to make a life-sized peacock open its tail, 18 rainbow doves do the wave and a circle of birds flap, wheel and spin overhead.
Move the mirrors together in the Rosette Kaleidoscope, and the images multiply like—well, like rabbits!
Guests can’t resist the sound and the movements of the Earthworm as it zigzags down through the ‘ground’.
Tumbling Bumblebees and Jumping Slugs both live in the same device, an air table that makes the three "bees" do a magical mid-air dance. In A Garden of Gizmos, slugs live in holes. You can drop the slugs into their holes, and watch what happens. Put one too many slugs in the holes and all of a sudden, most of the others pop up.
A Garden of Gizmos also has Trees and Seeds. Dance on a tilting platform in the Date Palm Boogie and three palm trees with trunks made of flower pots sway and dance with you. The trunks of the trees are made from recycled plastic flowerpots.
Guests get real Maple Seeds to fly, sink or hover before their eyes by controlling the speed of the fan.