A fan of Vincent Van Gogh in Bosnia has transformed a plot of land into a giant, lifelike reproduction of the painter’s masterpiece “Starry Night” made of thousands of plants.
“Vincent Van Gogh is ours too. This is our heritage and it is a way of paying tribute to him,” Halim Djukic told AFP.
Behind him, thousands of lavender bushes, grasses and other plants across an area of a dozen hectares create swirls and spirals that – seen from the air – clearly resemble the celestial configurations painted by the Dutch Post-Impressionist master in 1889.
“It was not possible to reproduce a flat image on three-dimensional space,” Zukic said.
“Inspired by paintings, we tried to stick to shapes and proportions, to make it look as painting-like as possible.
“And I think we succeeded.”
The 56-year-old entrepreneur first noticed the land 20 years ago when he was returning from a day out picking mushrooms in the forest around the village of Luznica in central Bosnia.
He purchased the first plot of land with the idea of building a cottage and a small, circular garden.
At that time, he was not even thinking about “Starry Night”, one of the favorite landscapes of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
But the idea came in 2018 when Zukic noticed tracks left by a tractor on the lawn.
“To my eye, these tracks looked like the spirals of “Starry Night” and it was an immediate decision.”
130,000 lavender plants
The former insurance company owner, who now works in tourism, bought more land and started working on it, with 20-30 gardeners helping every day.
He declined to say how much it cost to complete his labor of love, which took six years to finalize.
“We planted about 130,000 lavender bushes, thousands of aromatic and medicinal plants, several thousand trees,” he said.
“There is not a single straight line in the park – just like nature.”
At the same time, Đukić became interested in Van Gogh, about whom he knew little at the time.
Today, Đukić speaks animatedly about the painter, his “love of nature” and “the passion with which he approached his work”.
In 2023, he traveled to France to visit the places where Van Gogh spent some of his most prolific years – Arles and Saint-Rémy-en-Provence.
The artist painted “Starry Night” in June 1889, when he was in the Saint-Rémy psychiatric hospital.
A year later, he committed suicide at the age of 37.
At the moment, only a few visitors have had the chance to appreciate Đukić’s park.
Plants and trees still need time to flourish, he said, so the public will need to be patient for a few more months. “Having money is not enough. You need time to park,” he said. “I would say we’ve laid a good foundation. The park will get more beautiful every year.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
