Children tending the plants in the Micah House Chapel garden need only glance up to take in majestic mountains, the Zanja irrigation ditch or the Burrage Mansion.

All of those landmarks are featured in a mural that the children helped design and paint at the after-school program next to Sylvan Park in north Redlands.

The mural and the garden were dedicated in a short ceremony on Thursday afternoon, Nov. 8. Diana Lawson, program coordinator for the after-school ministry supported by the nonprofit Trinity Community Foundation, said it all started last March, when she took the children for some walks through the park’s rose garden.

The first time, the roses were blooming and fragrant and the children were delighted. But the next time they visited, the bushes had all been pruned. The children wanted to know why.

Lawson thought there might be lessons to be taught – about gardening, life cycles and such – if she could plant a few roses in an unused plot in front of the Micah House buildings on Chapel Street.

Then Emily Bueermann, of the Redlands Horticultural Society, suggested that Micah House apply for a $200 grant from the society, which Lawson figured she could use for the roses.

As she talked about her idea to her staff, volunteers and parents, it began to grow.

“Suddenly I had a garden committee of more than 10 people,” Lawson said.

Volunteers Sandi and David Adrian created a landscape design, including planters, a retaining wall and benches. Mike Morse, a volunteer who has been running a bicycle club for Micah House for 10 years, built the benches – one that encircles a palm tree and another along a building on the plot’s west side.

Bueermann suggested plants for the landscaping and University of Redlands students, during their May Term community service projects, helped plant them.

Some city employees who work in Sylvan Park, Ken Bolger and John Ostler – known as Park John to the kids – helped out with irrigation lines.

Volunteer Susan Auciello, who tutors the Micah students and reads to them, helped create the mural. She and members of the Redlands Art Association taught the students about brush strokes and techniques. They created a smaller, practice mural inside Micah House before blocking out the design on the outside wall and setting to work on that.

“To do art with Micah House was a dream come true,” Auciello said. “Two of my favorite things.”

In a bit of synchronicity, one of the Redlands Bowl presentations last summer was a ballet performance of “The Secret Garden.” Lawson made sure the students attended.

Now that the work is completed, the students use the garden often. They have special programs there, read books there and tend the plants twice a week, Lawson said.

“The kids trim and weed. It’s not something that’s done and forgotten; it will be an ongoing process,” she said. “We can teach a lot of lessons in the garden.”

When Lawson looks at the finished project, she is amazed at what grew out of the idea of plant a couple of rose bushes.

“It’s what I hoped for, but more than I dreamed of,” she said. “You can’t do anything but give glory to God.”

Follow Jan Sears on Twitter: @jancsears or online at blog.pe.com/Redlands

Imagine a fantasyland full of sexy flowers dancing to pop music and guests dining on indulgent delicacies. Where low lights suggestive of fireflies illuminate faces sipping exquisitely crafted cocktails. Where acrobatic bumblebees swing from the rafters of a vintage Belgian circus tent and lush greenery covers the white latticework of a secret garden.

For years, this exotic world existed only in the mind of Marty LaSalle, a juggler turned businessman who joined forces with an architect, a pop artist, stylist, musical director, choreographer and chef to create the Pleasure Garden. On Wednesday, this musical performance and restaurant will open in two red velvet-draped tents with ornately carved wood and mirrored doors in Miami’s Design District.

“The idea is to stimulate all the senses,” LaSalle says, “so that when you walk into the tent you are transported.”

LaSalle, who had a successful juggling act from an early age with his twin brother, drew on his experience under the big tops of Europe and the United States to create an environment that recalls the pleasure gardens of 19th century Europe. The installation, with all its moving parts, has come together “better than I could have dreamed,” he says.

LaSalle says he considered opening the show in New York, but decided on Miami, “a place that people are increasingly looking to for art and entertainment.” With a climate that lends itself to year-round outdoor entertainment and a rich cross-section of residents, he says, the Magic City is the perfect place to debut a production that is experimental yet decidedly “commercial, not avant-garde.”

“The Design District was an obvious choice for us because it’s a neighborhood that has cachet, is up-and-coming and understood as trendy,” he says.

Turning empty space into “active art” is the larger vision for Temporary Entertainment, the company LaSalle is launching with the creation of the Pleasure Garden. He imagines “popup performances” bringing beauty to forgotten corners of urban landscapes around the world, with musical performances and provocative installations. The show will run in Miami until Jan. 6, he says, and he’s looking into taking it to New York and Los Angeles.

The theater element of the experience is Orchid, an amalgam of song, dance and acrobatics that explores themes of innocence and experience, beauty and seduction, says William Baker, the director. Drawing on his experience as the stylist behind pop music productions like Britney Spears’ Circus tour as well as his theology studies at King’s College in London, Baker has created a loose narrative that follows a Garden of Eden-inspired discovery set to well-known pop songs.

“It’s an interesting collision between pop and burlesque that is hopefully very intelligent,” he says, comparing the melancholy figure of the Master Gardener to God or a circus master of ceremonies. The flowers that populate the garden are “celebrations of femininity,” or botanical versions of the biblical characters of Salome with her seven veils, Jezebel and, of course, Eve.

These themes are embodied by the title character, played by vocalist Lexy Romano, 25. Orchid is “the most natural thing in the world,” Romano says, adding that of course a flower is going to get pollinated and of course a girl is going to lose her innocence.

The performers had a grueling rehearsal schedule as the complex production was built from scratch in a little more than two months. Richard E. Waits, who plays the Master Gardener, says the production has a decidedly collaborative feel.

“A lot of the younger cast members don’t realize how rare that is,” Waits says. “But for me it’s like paradise.”

The other feature of the production is a three-course, prix-fixe menu for $38 by award-winning Miami chef Michelle Bernstein that takes circus fare to its elegant extreme with dishes such as truffle popcorn, caramelized onion dip, lobster salad sliders and Kobe beef hot dogs. The dining tent is set up within the Pleasure Garden, beside the theater tent.

The idea of finding sophistication in ordinary things runs throughout the production and is a characteristic of Miami itself, says architect Luis Pons, who designed the exterior garden and is known in Miami for his 2005 Art Basel installation The Fabulous Floating Inflatable Villa.

Pons says this installation, and LaSalle’s vision of Temporary Entertainment, could provide a nimble model with a brighter future than traditional stage productions.

“I think this show reflects a new way of understanding entertainment, adapted to a new reality where productions have smaller budgets after the crash of 2008,” Pons says. “From now on, for shows to be successful, they have to be from the heart.”

The Pleasure Garden will be unlike anything people have experienced, he says, and will “touch your senses in a very deep way.”

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“Where you find the darkest avenue/ There you’ll find the brightest jewel,” sings Richard Thompson. That would describe the improbable garden Richard Gervais and designer Chris Jacobson have conjured up in South of Market’s ecologically mean streets. We’re tempted to call it a secret garden, but the redwood anchoring one corner shows up on Google Maps. Gervais’ touch has also spread to this narrow street, now tree-lined and refreshed by plants. But nothing prepares visitors for what’s inside.

Through a corridor of Southeast Asian carvings, one enters a lush piece of the tropics transplanted to San Francisco. Jacobson and Gervais, a longtime importer of Asian antiques, have assembled a distinctive blend of plants and art. Surrounding walls cast shade, so the stars here are foliage plants, sparked by occasional flowers: ferns, Japanese maples, bromeliads, monsteras, gingers, begonias, giant strelitzia, bamboos of every color and size – forest, understory, rain forest plants.

Large koi swim in a sunken pond ingeniously designed to evoke a running stream. On each side, mirrors framed in Balinese temple doors and Philippine runo-reed matting insinuate themselves subtly to visually expand the space. The pond and massed plants encourage each other physically, sharing moisture and nutrients, filtering the city air.

Everything reflects Gervais’ fascination with the East, especially the Philippines. Among the flagstones and bridging the pond are traviesas – 100-year-old railroad ties of Philippine molave wood, “the hardest wood in all Asia,” Gervais said. Grave markers from the southern islands, carved from volcanic stone, are upholstered in volunteer moss; so is a carved-coral spirit boat. An Indian cart wheel supports a glass table top.

All the moss, the aged timbers, the floor of stone and pebble mosaic make the spot feel serenely ancient, but only the redwood and a couple of tree ferns were there when Gervais moved in, 17 years ago. “The place had been a club for SM types,” Jacobson recalled; Gervais added, “with an ugly burnt-orange hot tub in one corner.”

Gervais started out in Springfield, Mass. (“I had to get out!”), drove west in 1964, headed for the University of Hawaii and spent a week in San Francisco: “I fell in love with the city while waiting for my ship to leave.” Inexplicably, Hawaii bored him, and he returned to finish school at San Francisco State. A world tour with a fellow student concluded in the Philippines, his companion’s homeland. Gervais knew nothing about the country, but was entranced by the people. He and his traveling companion set up the New Manila Import Co., which eventually became the Richard Gervais Collection; the garden is part of the showroom.

Chris Jacobson is an old friend, recently reconnected, who used Gervais’ art imports in clients’ gardens. A native Californian, he too had the urge to light out for the territories: “At 16, I tried to hitchhike out of Auburn in my new sport jacket.” No one picked him up. He hired out as a gardener in his teens, then worked as a ditchdigger for commercial landscapers. “I could always get a job because I knew plant names,” he said.

Six months away from an art degree, a falling-out with his faculty adviser (“He said people like me didn’t belong in art”) sent him back to his garden roots: “I started bringing my art background into landscaping. I wanted people to know there was an art to gardening.” He says he’s never taken a horticulture class.

Jacobson’s credo, published in Sunset’s Western Landscaping book: “I like gardens that connect their owners with the real world of earth, weather, seasons and change.”

“I have an environmental point of view,” he said. “That involves trying to be responsible, incrementally move closer to the goal of sustainability, cut back on water and chemicals.” But that doesn’t mean the result has to be boring: “When I want to introduce clients to the rather exotic style I work in, I take them to Flora Grubb’s and to Richard’s warehouse. They either get it or they don’t.”

After an hour in this fascinating, marvelously oxygenating oasis, we get it.

Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan are naturalists and freelance writers in Berkeley. E-mail: home@sfchronicle.com