This park recreates Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ with a dazzling display of plants, trees and winding paths

Look at Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Nightand do you wish you could enter the wonderful 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 green space with colorful shrubs and winding sidewalks.

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

Then he saw tractor tracks in a meadow that reminded him of Van Gogh’s famous painting. A light bulb went off and Zukic decided to replicate the painting using his own country as a canvas.

“Construction machines served as our brushes, and our colors were plants,” he says Forbes. “There is not a single straight line throughout the entire space.”

Zukic bought more land and hired a team of about twenty gardeners. He recently 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 sanctuary that celebrates the cultural heritage of central Bosnia.

“This is the largest representation of it the starry night, and the result of twenty years of dreaming, of turning those dreams into reality,” he says Reuters‘ Daria Sito-sucic.

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

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

Zukic and his team have tried for years to capture Van Gogh’s visual language. They built sidewalks, expanded streams into lakes and planted thousands of trees. They also brought 130,000 lavender bushes to recreate the painting’s swirling features and added aromatic herbs such as chamomile, echinacea, sage and wormwood.

The park is scheduled to open in May 2025. While some colors may look muted from the air, “up close they have a vibrancy that mirrors the brilliant blues and yellows of Van Gogh’s painting,” according to Forbes. In addition, some plants and trees in the park still need time to mature.

“Having money is not enough,” says Zukic 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 looked as much like the painting as possible – and I think we succeeded.”