Garden Festival

The 2015 International Garden Festival is opening 6 new gardens in Canada, the United States, France and Israel, chosen among the 309 proposals submitted.

The International Garden Festival opens its 16th edition in the company of more than 50 landscape architects, architects and designers from Canada, the United States, France and Israel.

The 2015 Festival is opening 6 new gardens chosen from among the 309 proposals submitted from designers around the world. Visitors are invited to move, touch and smell the gardens and even get their feet wet.

Top: Groupe A, Se Moullier, Québec, Canada. Photo Groupe A / Annexe U. The installation explores the discussion about invasive species and the delicate balance of ecosystems. Here plants will be kept in a kind of vise that visitors will be invited to enter. The plant will escape over the course of the summer. Loss of control? When what is beautiful becomes dangerous. Above: Talmon Biran architecture studio, Around About, Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo Martin Bond. Unlike the Japanese Zen garden, which is designed to be seen from the outside, this garden will be viewed, created and experienced from the inside, through a joyful and playful activity. As visitors walk away from the roundabouts, their footsteps violate the orderly pattern of the gravel. Once they get back on the roundabouts and spin them, the garden returns to its ordered perfection

Many of the ephemeral gardens of the 2015 edition are interactive. The goal is to intrigue and excite our visitors with the unknown and the unfamiliar. Trees that move through the landscape, blue flowers that are woven into a pathway or green roundels that shimmer like poplars in the wind. Children, large and small, can don coloured gumboots to traverse a pond and discover what is hidden in its midst.

DIXNEUFCENTQUATREVINGTSIX Architecture, I like to move it, paris, france. Photo Martin Bond. In this garden, the visitor will face a seemingly wild meadow. Grasses and a few birch trees grow together against the backdrop of dense greenery. There seems to be little going on here. But the straight lines at ground level, punctuating the space, create a rhythm and attract the visitor’s attention. On approaching one turns around, scans, wonders and finally touches. That is when the trees begin to move. Visitors can slide the trees along their tracks and create their own garden. The banal becomes strange. Nature domesticated transforms the landscape into a garden
Pete North and his master’s degree students in landscape archiecture at the University of Toronto, Macro / Micro / Myco, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The garden is an invitation to be fully enveloped by these enigmatic organisms, the mushrooms, allowing one to experience their delicate and provocative forms. The garden offers the unique experience of traversing scales in which we appreciate the mycelial process: macro, or the vastness of the environment they inhabit and support and micro, or the wonder of these tiny organisms and the intimacy they invoke
Meaghan Hunter & Suzy Melo, Popple, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Photo Martin Bond. This garden is a distillation of the existing site through the use of colorful curtains that mimic the magical sounds and imagery of the trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides). A vertical plane of multi-colored discs dance in the wind, creating a melody and visual buzz indicative of the trembling leaves of the aspen. Visitors are encouraged to interact with the curtains to enhance the movement of the disc leaves
Kihan Kim & Ophélie Bouvet, Paris, France. Photo: Martin Bond. A white surface is installed over the garden, which acts as a revealing filter activated by (the) blooming. The vibrating surface of the cordage creates confusion between the immersed or submerged parts of the plants. This creative growing moment goes along with the buzzing bees attracted by the honey plants. The resulting tapestry woven by the flowers will gradually take shape under the eyes of the visitor each days of the Festival


until September 27, 2015
International Garden Festival
Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens
Grand-Métis, Canada