Wickedly Odd – The Night Garden is a sensational dining and innovative entertainment experience, perfect for year-end corporate functions, to be held in the Durban Botanic Gardens over the festive season.
Have you ever wondered what happens after the gates at Durban’s iconic Botanic Gardens are locked? Do the trees, birds and animals settle in silence, or is it then, when Durban sleeps, that these magnificent Gardens wake?
The Durban Botanic Gardens Trust has teamed up with Emma Lockhart and Bradley Porter of Specialist Event company Experience This, award winning actor/producer Ben Voss (Beauty Ramapelepele, Spud, Green and Black Mamba) and acclaimed set designer and video producer Clint McLean to bring you a night of experiential food and festivity set in the heart of Durban’s greatest botanical wonderland.
On arrival, guests will be welcomed with a glass of champagne and taken on a whimsical amble up the garden path, to the sunken summer garden beneath the gnarled branches of South Africa’s oldest Litchi tree, for a 1930’s “garden party” welcome drink and snack.
After some savoury scones, Pimms or a gin and tonic, and as the sun sets over Giant Jacarandas, Paper Trees, Figs and Banyans, patrons will be given an hour and a half to enjoy the gardens at night – sauntering through pockets of botanical curiosity and wonder individually chosen by Curator Martin Clement. The gardens will be lit up and brought to life by quirky characters, musicians, dancers and puppets with hidden bars and experiences waiting to be discovered.
At 8:30pm the performers will lead the guests to a glorious Bedouin tent for dinner, hosted by Beauty Ramapelepele. Here they will be treated to the finest plated menu Durban has to offer designed by Silwood Cookery School graduate Kathryn Stone. Throughout dinner, the trees, birds and hidden creatures of the gardens will permeate proceedings, morphing the night into a whimsical, bewitching and fantastical blend of luscious food, crisp champagne, magical puppetry and curious delight.
From 10pm a live band will play to accommodate all tastes. This is time for an upbeat razzle in the most enchanted venue in Durban.
Wickedly Odd – The Night Garden is not a show, a dinner, or a party. It’s a gloriously unusual Christmas dining and entertainment experience. We invite you to slip behind the moss curtain of fantasy and immerse yourself in our captivating world of botanical peculiarity, four metre flamingos, marvellous praying mantis’s, aerial acrobats, beetled barmen, feathered barmaids and cantankerous crows.
Durban Botanic Gardens: 20 November – 6 December 2015