"Light': Longwood Gardens' first art piece

It was a dark and stormy night when I went to Longwood Gardens recently to see "Light," a vast, astonishing installation by the English artist/designer Bruce Munro. A bright half-moon played hide and seek with a sky full of moody clouds, teasing out shadows among the giant old trees and then snatching them away again"“ just the ticket for a display that felt at times like something that had settled into the landscape from Outer Space.

"Light"— the first art piece ever commissioned by Longwood Gardens— is not only spectacular but also ethereally beautiful and at times very moving. Munro traffics in the poetic and the technological, combining the hard science of fiber optics with boundless imagination to create old-fashioned magic that inspires and delights. His "Light" is romantic and gently thrilling, like candles flickering in a dark room or the glowing grins of jack-o-lanterns on Halloween.

Longwood Gardens at night isn't especially exotic, what with all the evening concerts and performances, but "Light" is different. Hours have been extended, for one thing. More important, you have to venture beyond the normal limits to see it all, out where it's really, really dark.

Shifting before your eyes

Help comes from luminaries placed along the walks and from volunteer guides at strategic junctions, but you still feel that wonderful frisson down the spine, the feeling of being some place that's not quite where you're supposed to be. The act of taking that step beyond the ordinary is a kind of portal, allowing you to enter Munro's world, a place where light is alive, pulsing and changing, shifting colors and intensity before your eyes.

Longwood has organized eight large outdoor installations to ease visitors into this world. From the Visitor Center you first come upon Arrow Spring, a winding line of feathery lights spilling down a rise.

Then, out of the corner of your eye, you catch sight of the next glow and head for Small Lake, where— in the work called "Field of Light"— thousands of lighted glass spheres crowd the far bank. The waves of color— glowing pink, blue and yellow— spread their sparkle twice, on land and across the surface of the dark water.

Alien gift

"Water Towers," set in a field, most resembles a whimsical alien gift lowered to Earth for our pleasure. Music greets you even before the small forest of standing columns, pulsing with colored light, comes into sight.

Those columns, composed of recycled soda bottles fitted with fiber optic cables, evoke an eerie shifting beauty that's mesmerizing, especially with the fixed dark line of trees visible beyond. People of all ages, in evident delight, scampered among the cylinders when I was there, punctuating the light and color with their shadowy silhouettes.

If Water Towers was crafted by aliens, the next installation— "Forest of Light"— is the work of fairies. Along Forest Walk (the path to The Lookout Loft tree house), bulbs on sticks sprout from the ground in profusion, blinking brightness everywhere you look.

Siren song

The spectacle goes on and on, pulling you farther along a trail under the forest canopy. It's like a siren song from an enchanted flute, dazzling your mind and enticing you into a realm beyond the human.

Longwood Gardens is already a magical place even in its everyday clothes. With its thousand-plus acres, its 20 outdoor gardens and 20 indoor gardens, its elegant-beyond-belief Conservatory and about a million other extraordinary features, this is one cake that needs no icing. When an institution does something special even though it doesn't have to, we can be very grateful indeed.