News

The International Garden Festival welcomes the 50 designers participating in the creation of the 26 gardens featured as part of its 14^th edition. The Festival opens to the public on Saturday, June 22.

Six new projects were chosen by a jury following an international competition. The jury chose among the record 290 proposals submitted by over 725 architects, landscape architects, designers and artists from 31 countries.The new gardens that will be exhibited for the 2013 edition are by designers from Canada, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, South Korea and the United States.

Sacré potager by atelier barda [Patrick Morand, Antonio Di Bacco, Cécile Combelle and Julien Pinard], Montréal, Canada and Paris, France. An installation that presents the profane and the sacred in discreet wooden altars that evoke the wayside crosses once found on Québec’s country roads. Each one will bring the visitor to explore our culinary and horticultural heritage. An invitation to return heritage seeds and plants to our gardens our plates and grocery store shelves.
Courtesy of Nature by Johan Selbing and Anouk Vogel, Amsterdam, Netherlands. In this reference to the white walls and silent spaces of contemporary museums, Courtesy of Nature exhibits and encourages visitors to explore their relationship to nature. Should it be worshipped? protected? How should it be developed or exploited? A way of illustrating this age-old debate in a new light, to better understand the nature around us.
Dead Garden II by Carlos M. Teixeira, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Dead Garden II is a garden made of tree trunks and branches found nearby. It takes advantage of an inexorable phenomenon: every life is a foretold failure, every plant will perish, and organic matter one day will be of use to somebody else. Trees die and new trees are born. Growth and becoming are tools of the landscape architect, but rarely the cycle of life and death is the substance of garden design. The garden also plays with the corridor, a useless and avoided space in architectural plans that here becomes a series of parallel aisles activated by means of an inanimate natural element.
Edge Effect by Snohetta [Claire Fellman, Nick Koster, Karli Molter, Misako Murata and Maura Rockcastle], New York, USA. The threshold between forest and field offers contrasting environments. The forest floor and the un-mown field are the threshold between the horizontal and the vertical and offer an opportunity to observe where the edge becomes the centre.
Pink Punch by Nicholas Croft and Michaela MacLeod, New York, USA. Pink Punch attracts visitors off the beaten path by its color, lured through the garden rooms and into the forest. A small cluster of trees are wrapped at their bases to become a pinkscape of communal seating.
Smart Small by Ecoid [Yongkyu Kim and Jonghyun Baek], Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA. These small intelligent units are where mosses and herbs are grown. Visitors can take part in the creative process of planting and placing these experimental units. A new garden by Montréal designers NIPpaysage is being built around the theme The Right Tree in the Right Place, sponsored by Hydro-Québec. The garden is both a pedagogical and a play space, designed to instruct visitors on the importance of planting the right trees near to hydro lines.

See the description of all gardens.