It looks like some kind of seed pod or pine cone caught mid-explosion. At the center, there’s a jumble of trumpets-turned-terraria—conical containers for space-going plants—and from this central core extend more than two dozen curved and spindly arms, each with a heavy-looking disc at its end.
This is a Space Garden. Well, a one-third-scale model of one that was exhibited last week at the Venice Biennale exhibition in Italy. The people who came up with Space Garden want to send a full-size version, stocked with real plants and seeds, to low Earth orbit within the next five to seven years.
It is, in part, an effort to reimagine what life in