The Galaxy Garden

The Galaxy Garden resides in the Paleaku Peace Sanctuary in Honaunau Hawaii

My friend Jon Lomberg, with whom I recently stayed in Hawaii, has designed and built something unique on our planet, a beautiful garden that reflects the scale and components of the Milky Way, our home galaxy.

The gold sphere represents a magnified Solar System

The Milky Way is so vast that all of the stars that we see with our naked eyes would reside on leaves only a few inches apart in the garden. Our sun and solar system would be but a few molecules wide.

Jon & Simon by the fountain representing the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way

The Galaxy Garden also gives a measure of the scale of our galactic neighbourhood. Andromeda, the galaxy next door would reside about a 1/2 mile away, the local Virgo super-cluster of galaxies would occupy 40 miles of the Hawaiian coast, and the known universe would roughly be the size of Planet Earth!

A 3D cross-view of the Galaxy Garden