Gardens by the Bay is a park on reclaimed seabed on the Singapore waterfront, and almost nothing in it happened by itself. Eighteen steel supertrees stand between 25 and 50 metres tall, planted with more than two hundred species that climb their frames instead of growing from the ground. A walkway called the OCBC Skyway runs 128 metres between the two tallest, which puts you level with the planted canopy and looking out over Marina Bay. Every evening the grove lights up in time with music, purple and green and gold, free to anyone standing on the lawn beneath it. From the eastern edge the lit towers stack directly against the three columns of Marina Bay Sands, with the downtown skyline behind them. An hour after the show the lawn has emptied and the canopies are still glowing, so you get the same composition without the crowd in it.
The two glass domes beside the grove are stranger. In the Cloud Forest a man-made mountain rises 42 metres with a waterfall dropping 35 metres off its face, and a walkway spirals up beside it through cold, wet air, past ferns and orchids that normally grow between 1,000 and 3,000 metres up a tropical mountain. The dome is held at the temperature of those mountains, so the air around you feels nothing like the street outside. Next door the Flower Dome keeps olive trees and baobabs in a cool, dry Mediterranean climate, and the field at its centre is torn out and replanted several times a year, so what you walk into depends on the month: tulips, orchids, lilies, sunflowers. The cold in both domes is made by fire. A furnace burning horticultural waste, prunings from street trees across the island, drives the chillers, and the supertrees vent its exhaust. Deciduous cherries will not break bud without a cold dormancy, so they cannot live outdoors anywhere in the tropics. The ones flowering in there every spring are doing it one degree off the equator, on a winter that the city's own prunings are burning to make.