Sculpture in the Garden Returns: Where Nature Frames Art in Chapel Hill

ORANGE SLICES

By Laurie Paolicelli
Guest Columnist

Corona Digital Gateway, powder-coated steel, Jim Gallucci, Greensboro, N.C.

One of our favorite fall traditions is just around the corner. This September, the North Carolina Botanical Garden welcomes back Sculpture in the Garden, its beloved annual exhibition pairing the work of local artists with the Garden’s own curated landscapes. Now in its 38th year, the show transforms the Garden’s paths and display beds into an open-air gallery, inviting visitors to wander among sculptures tucked into native plantings and to see, once again, how art and the natural world can sharpen each other.

From left: Pitcher Planter, soda fired stoneware, David Roswell; Cycle of Cernunnos, painted galvanized steel, Forrest Greenslade; and Sonoran Sentinel, steel and ceramics, Gary Taber.

It’s fitting that a show built on the relationship between art and landscape calls the North Carolina Botanical Garden home — because under the leadership of Executive Director Damon Waitt, the Garden has become one of the region’s most visible voices for the idea that beauty and conservation aren’t separate missions. They’re the same one.

Marshland Morning, painted galvanized steel, Forrest Greenslade, Pittsboro, NC

That idea reached a national audience earlier this year, when CBS Sunday Morning featured a segment on the Venus flytrap — and North Carolina, fittingly, was at the center of the story. Chapel Hill’s own Damon Waitt sat down with CBS to talk about one of the plant world’s most recognizable characters, and one of its most endangered.

CBS Sunday Morning visited the North Carolina Botanical Garden to explore its work protecting Venus flytraps. Watch the segment on YouTube here

The Venus flytrap is native exclusively to a roughly 90-mile radius around Wilmington, North Carolina — nowhere else on Earth. That narrow range, paired with the plant’s odd, snapping charisma, has made it both beloved and vulnerable. The segment traced the mounting threats to wild populations: poaching by collectors, habitat loss to development, and the slow squeeze of a shrinking coastal plain. It also showcased what the North Carolina Botanical Garden is doing about it — from roadside rescues that pull threatened plants out of harm’s way, to a seed bank effort built to safeguard the species’ genetic future.

It’s a reminder of what the Garden does year-round, often quietly: standing between a singular species and its disappearance.

Sculpture in the Garden is the season this work opens its gates and hands visitors a different way in — through art, through a fall afternoon on the trails, through a preview party under string lights.

In Chapel Hill, that’s what nature and art keep teaching side by side: that preserving something rare — a plant found nowhere else, a landscape shaped by careful hands — is itself a creative act, and one worth showing up for.

It’s fitting, then, that the same botanical garden CBS came calling on for its flytraps is also home to Sculpture in the Garden, where artists set their work loose among native plants and let the two shape each other. Neither the garden nor the sculptures are trying to overpower the other. They’re in conversation — one testament to what’s been protected, the other to what’s been imagined. Come see for yourself what happens when the wild and the made-by-hand share the same ground.

Nature and art both ask us to slow down and pay attention. Whether it’s a rare plant that took thousands of years to evolve its defenses, or a sculpture placed just so among the trees, they’re both teaching us the same lesson: what’s worth protecting is worth noticing first.

The North Carolina Botanical Garden display garden is open Tuesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and closed on Mondays and university holidays. 

Sculpture in the Garden Dates

• Exhibition Dates: Sunday, September 13 through Sunday, December 6, 2026.
• Preview Party: Saturday, September 12, 2026, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. (tickets required and can be purchased here).
• Cost: Free and open to the public during normal garden hours.

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Disclaimer: Published by Orange County’s Tourism Department through its Public Relations team, this story includes interviews and repurposed content from websites and partner press releases. For more, visit www.visitchapelhill.org or contact Laurie Paolicelli.

Laurie Paolicelli is executive director for the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau, a position she has held since 2005. Laurie has worked in tourism and marketing for twenty-five years, having served in leadership roles in Houston and California convention and visitor bureaus. She is a native of the Twin Ports of Duluth, MN/Superior Wisconsin. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business and Communications from the University Wisconsin-Superior and graduate certification in Technology In Marketing from the UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. This reporter can be reached at Information@TheLocalReporter.press