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The first day of spring was a fitting debut for ABC Stone’s new exhibition celebrating the dynamic relationship between stone and nature.

Stone in Landscape Architecture: A Sensory Journey, on view through June 13 at ABC’s Greenpoint, Brooklyn, location, features five 350-square-foot installations packed into a shed-like pavilion built inside a warehouse. Each “vignette” was designed by a landscape architecture firm to showcase a specific stone within an environment of plants, trees, and flowers. The show was conceived by Lyndsey Belle Tyler, ABC’s creative director and vice president of marketing; coordinated by special projects director Jaqueline Diogo; and inspired by the Gardens on Parade exhibition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Initial invitations were sent to the firms just before Thanksgiving, completed drawings were submitted by December 20, and then they had a month to complete their projects.

Photo by Julie Florio, courtesy ABC Stone

The result—an intimate engagement with landscape architecture—is an experience unlike any other currently on view in New York. A stone path guides you, first, to Supermass Studios’ oblong fluid form, a reinterpretation of the firm’s planter seating at LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B carved from golden sun granite with a bed of yellow daffodils in the center. It’s as much an invitation—to sit, to touch, to experience the stone—as it is an introduction to the exhibit. Just beyond, inside the shed, is Design Workshop’s abstract-dinosaur-skeleton-like piece, a mirrored series of increasingly large slabs of madras gray sandstone separated by space large enough to walk through. A physical representation of a dataset charting the exponential growth of human-made carbon dioxide emissions over the last 200 years, it’s the only vignette without a planting and gives physical form to the “profound and urgent story” of climate change.

Photos by Julie Florio, courtesy ABC Stone

Nature is in abundance, though, in the other three installations, beginning with Oehme, van Sweden’s madras-red sandstone micro-garden, its form inspired by the sinuous sculptures of Henry Moore. (A film about Moore plays on a television, which visitors can listen to using provided headphones). Opposite is RKLA Studio’s love letter to Danby marble and a tribute to the layers of history and New York’s industrial heritage. Bracketed by small firs, RKLA’s space has a rough-hewn bench off to one side and is dotted with thin, smooth, six-foot-tall columns atop a marble floor artistically cracked to mimic the sky in Charles Sheeler’s 1954 painting Stacks in Celebration. Looming just over the back wall of RKLA’s space is a 20-foot magnolia tree beckoning you to LaGuardia Design Group’s installation. A sequence of waist high blocks of renaissance gray limestone in various textures line one side; opposite is a long, smooth limestone bench; and at the terminus is a tranquil waterfall emanating from a stack of four large limestone blocks. Three TV screens playing nature scenes and quotes from Antoni Gaudí, Norman Jaffe, and Mies van der Rohe inscribed on the stone floor complete the sensory experience.

Photos by Julie Florio, courtesy ABC Stone

Given its tight space, Stone in Landscape Architecture could easily feel overwhelming and confining. But no one design overwhelms another (though that magnolia is hard to ignore). Each vignette offers its own moment of experience and relief, thanks in part to the please-touch attitude—there’s something primal about running your hand over a piece of marble or limestone. All the nature present inside the shed, though, helps soften the hard stone environments and makes everything feel more open. Summerhill Associates partner Tom Volk worked with the firms to get what they needed, and to ensure the pavilion is properly equipped so the trees and flowers can thrive inside a Brooklyn warehouse, from installation in February through the three-month run of the exhibit.

Indeed, the presence of all those plants makes you want to plan a return visit later in the spring. Just to see how things have changed. But even if you can only swing one visit, it’s worth the trek to Greenpoint.

Photo by Julie Florio, courtesy ABC Stone

Stone in Landscape Architecture: A Sensory Journey is on view through June 13 at ABC Stone’s Brooklyn location, 234 Banker Street. Visitors are welcome daily from 9am–4pm by appointment, which can be made by emailing tina@abcworldwidestone.com.