Tag: Bisou Dexler

Just before I took my break from blogging at the start of October 2025, I received a suggestion that I visit the latest chapter of Bisou Dexler’s Outer Garden region builds. While I was able to hop over and grab some photos, I wasn’t at the time able to get an actual blog post written up prior to taking that break.

The Outer Garden is a place I’ve been visiting on a semi-regular basis for over a decade, my first visit being way back in February 2015. As such, I was keen to cover this latest chapter – called The Outer Garden annex **Lumen Tide** – so here, a little belatedly, is my piece.

Occupying a Homestead region, The Outer Garden annex – as the name suggests – is a separate setting to The Outer Garden. It sits as a dreamlike night setting, offered as a love sonnet from Bisou to Aki69. Overhead, a starry sky split by the arc of a Milky Way-like band brings night to the setting, whilst beneath it, an infinite sea sparkles from horizon to horizon, shallow waves washing over the region itself and tickling the feet of visitors as they arrive.

Across this expanse of water lie star-like lanterns, each one glowing with colour and giving the impression it has fallen from the sky overhead. In support of this, smaller versions of these lanterns either hover just above the water, or slowly drop towards it, their gentle descent here and there contrasting with the rapid, bright lines of falling meteors or mixing with the yellow phosphoresce of swirling fireflies (been sure to have particles enabled in your viewer!).

However, the most startling and engaging elements of the setting are perhaps the drifting celestial jellyfish as they swim and float through the air, sometimes vanishing into the water, sometimes rising from it; together with the golden crescent lying just below the surface of the water towards the middle of the region.

At first resembling an underwater sandbar, it is only when one swings the viewer camera up over the setting that the “sandbar” reveals itself to be a crescent Moon, casting its own light up into the setting, adding a further layer of fantastical beauty to the design.

Throughout all of this can be found multiple places to sit and / or dance. The former take the form of little fishing stools sitting over the submerged Moon, through various boats and gondolas scattered over the water, to a bed suspended overhead (and perhaps easily missed if not actively looked for).

Music for the setting appears to be provided via You Tube, but whether it was an issue with my connection or something else, the music refused to play via the Media button. This being the case, I’m including this link to the list in case you visit hand have the same issue, so you can play the tracks in the background when exploring.

As a sonnet to Aki69, further depth is given to The Outer Garden annex by way of most of the elements within the region being creations from Aki69’s store, together with a short poem dedicated to aki69 by Bisou. The latter is offered both through the region’s About Land setting and Bisou’s profile picks:

When stars reach the twilight sky
Life’s wings rise from the water
Wearing fragile phosphorescence, spilling into the air

I forget even my casting
And listen to the wind pause

The moon emerges, night exhales
In that instant, life’s magic ignites
And the world holds its breath

Now, it feels
As if it’s just the two of us in this world.

Peaceful, beautifully created, and with a richness of love and tranquillity, The Outer Garden annex **Lumen Tide** is an ideal place for all romantics to visit.

SLurl Details

• The Outer Garden annex **Lumen Tide** (Sea of Flower, rated Moderate)

It has been just over two years since my last visit to Bisou Dexler’s The Outer Garden, a place of beauty and enigma, art and creative spark, and peace and contemplation. It’s a location which generally combines two settings, once which may change on a very subtle level from time to time / with the seasons, and the other often presenting something completely new.

The first of these settings is home to the main Landing Point. It is a sky platform occupied by the decaying hulk of a once grand manor house; one now with roofing gone and walls broken and cracked, and signs in places of attempts to rebuild. A long hallway stretches before arrivals, pointing the way to a distant stair climbing to a round window.

Rooms sit to either side of this hallway, one to the right  two on the left. The first, and closest to the landing point, appears to have one been a grand chamber. Now flooded by the waters pouring in from the walls, it is a beautiful garden space, with a snowy floor (as with much of the rest of the building) and pools through which the water tumbles and poppies, lobster claw, cattails and herbs grow, and over which gnarled trees hang their boughs.

A hole in the wall here offers access to the remnants of another grand room, of which little is now left but for columned wall sections and a tumbled tower, its sides open to the snow-covered gardens wherein multiple attractions might be reached and numerous more opportunities for photography found. Or’ if preferred, tea might be taken within might have once been a further hall linking two wings of the now broken and tumbling house.

Of the other rooms, one offers itself as a living space come boudoir; a place of music, art, and retreat, the jumbled furniture, floating balloons, musty books on their shelves and the detritus of a fallen ceiling and roof  giving it a sense of romantic charm. Beyond it sits what appears to have once been a private garden space or courtyard, separating the lounge / boudoir from the empty shell of the second room which can only be accessed from the grounds outside.

The long hall itself is (as ever) beautifully dressed and well frosted with winter, again offering multiple opportunities for photography. However, closest to the landing point is an introduction to the second setting within The Outer Garden, together with the first of two teleports leading to it. Simply sit at the mirror and select the option To Find Solace. On arrival, walk through the tunnel with its 3D representation of a garden from a Ukiyoe painting to where a trapeze artist’s ring hangs and you can teleport on to the main art installation (it doesn’t matter which of the listing destination options you choose.

Your destination will be a gorgeous 3D representation of a traditional Japanese painting, one which draws on Hagoromo, one of the most-performed Japanese Noh (dramatic dance) plays. Subject to multiple adaptations over the centuries (including W.B. Yeats, who drew upon its story for his one act play, At the Hawk’s Well), it tells of s fisherman who, whilst out walking on a springtime night, happens upon the feather cloak of a tennin (an aerial spirit or celestial dancer) hanging on a tree bough.

Taking the hagoromo, the fisherman plans on keeping it as an heirloom; however, the tennin sees him with it and begs for him to return it to her, for without it she cannot return to the heavenly realms. taking it, and demands its return – for she cannot return to Heaven without it. At first, the fisherman refuses, but touched by the tennin’s sorrow, he relents: he will return the hagoromo to her – if she will show him her celestial dance.

After hesitating in turn, the tennin agrees to his terms and she performs a symbolic dance honouring the Moon and its phases (represented by the number three, five and fifteen), before the fisherman returns her cloak to her, and she vanishes, “like a mountain slowly hidden in the mist”.

Within Bijou’s Hagoromo, elements of this story are present; there are fish to represent the fisherman, there’s the shoreline where he walked with his friends; little island sit on the water whilst the Moon can be seen in a number of symbolic forms. However, what is offered should not be taken as any literal interpretation of the play; rather, it is, as noted a 3D celebration of traditional Japanese art into which we can step and experience from within.

Multiple places to sit are available for this, including what I’m going to calla “celestial cart” which can carry visitors around and through the painting.  To explore on foot, simply pass under the line of Torii gates and drop down to the level below, and then from there make your way around (and down) to where another mirror teleport will return you either to the Torri gates or back to the intermediary teleport point, with the mirror there taking you back to the main landing point.

Throughout all of this there is a sense of serenity to be found; wandering the halls of the house or along the covered walkways of the painting, there are no distractions of unnecessary sounds or music (which is not to say The Outer Garden is entirely without sound; rather sounds are restricted to where they need to be), allowing the mind to settle and appreciate without undue agitation.

Magical.

Related Links

• The Outer Garden SLurl (Rated: Moderate)

For want of the need to unwind, I found myself in-world and re-visiting The Outer Garden, the always-engaging garden world designed by Bisou Dexler. The last time I visited, he gardens had moved from a sky platform to the ground; with this visit, I found it has not only moved back to the sky, it has relocated to a Mainland region.

The Outer Garden has always been a place of beauty and enigma, and this remains the case for the current iteration. The core of the build are the ruins of what appears to have once been a mighty manor house, much of it roofless and caught within the glowing light of a misty morning / evening (take your pick as to the time of day) which haunts the huge building with a ghostly glow.

The landing point sits at one end of the ruin’s main hall running from west – and the landing point – eastwards, various rooms and halls opening off of it, each with its own theme or secret. The first of these, opening on the right as one walks away from the landing point, forms a watery garden where water tumbles from the walls and forms a curtain within the arch of the room’s great window. These falls feed into a stream running within the room, shrouded in mist, and with trees and plants growing along its banks to form a mystic garden enclosed by the high stone walls.

Further along the hall sit another room, this one under a surviving part of roof of the manor house. Cluttered with furniture, it forms a cosy yet untidy space full of the warmth of life and a sense of retreat. Balloons float within the room, and a bed and painting canvases suggest this is home to someone, and the manor house not entirely deserted.

And there is still more: a broken access way into an inner garden the manor house may once have surrounded; a hall heavy in vines and with a stairway within it forming an artistic statement rather than being intended to anywhere; and a strange room of vanity screens and bed and an mannequin, all of which appear to be trying to tell a story. All bring character to the setting and are linked by smaller details waiting to be found along the hallway.

Beyond the ruins, the land continues to be shrouded in mist, the inner courtyard garden flank on this far side by the broken remains of the main house and a smaller, glass-roofed hallway now serving as a unique, if narrow, tea house.

The garden is also home to both a carousel and what looks to be a small Ferris wheel. Lit by a hundred glowing bulbs, the latter is beautifully ornate, if lacking cars one which people might ride around it. Beyond this, amidst the trees and mist lie still more ruins, chapel-like in form, but sans anything within their broken walls.

In my previous visits to The Outer Garden, teleports offer then means to visit two more settings The Moon is Serene and The Rose Garden, both of which I had in the past enjoyed spending time within. While the Destination Guide entry references a teleport mirror within The Outer Garden’s landing point and providing the means to visit other gardens, I confess that I did not see any such mirror either at the landing point or during my wanderings. Ergo, the images here only represent the main build.

Whether my lack of success in finding any teleport is down to my own failure or because the other gardens mentioned on the DG description are no longer available, I have no idea. If I did miss both teleport and additional spaces to explore, then the fault is mine alone, and I offer my apologies to Bisou from missing them.

Even so, The Outer Garden still retains its sense of beauty and mystery whilst offering multiple opportunities for photography and for simply escaping and relaxing. As such, it remains a recommended visit.

Related Links

• The Outer Garden SLurl (Rated: Moderate)