International Garden Festival Canada 2016

The International Garden Festival at Les Jardins Métis/Reford Gardens in Québec, Canada, has announced its 5 exciting new designers for the 2016 season.

 

Le caveau (The Cave) by Christian Poules of Switzerland.

By creating this 4-sided room with gabion walls, Poules invites us to enter, reflect and dream. The stone, moss and plant-covered plane lifts, symbolising a beginning – the seed and the soil, the tilted horizon between earth and sky.

Carbone by Coache Lacaille Paysagistes of France.

Humans have long left their mark by altering nature but a garden can be one of restorative power and a gesture of kindness. Inspired by the carbon cycle that is at the heart of all life, the garden looks at bringing nature back to life by regenerating the cut-down forest and sowing where we have harvested. Cut from a tree that was planted as a seed long ago by others, wood can be our crib, our bed and our coffin.

A sculpted tree trunk, partially cut into pieces helps to illustrate the primary material used to build furniture. A stump and its roots, a tree trunk cut into parts and five modules made of timber, some lightly burned on the surface. A young tree grows where the tree might have grown tall had the tree not fallen.

Cyclops by Craig Chapple, architect, Phoenix, Arizona, United States

A delicately cone made from 8 meter-long boards and concentric steel rings, Cyclops is held in tenuous balance by the environment that provides for it. The central 1.5m diameter viewing space gives us the chance to view the surrounding tree canopy while feeling the focus of the suspended weight as the physical latent force in the trees themselves. The viewer finds himself playing the central role of the work in rediscovering their relationship to the energy in their environment.

 

La maison de Jacques (Jack’s House) by Romy Brosseau, Rosemarie Faille-Faubert, Émilie Gagné-Loranger, intern architects, Canada

Inspired by the Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale, the garden is a ‘house that has become a green grove, enveloped in scarlet beans that climb and wind their way through the timber lattice structure. The bean seeds will be planted in May and then grow through the display period to more than 3 metres with flowers from the end of July.

TiiLT by SRCW [Sean Radford, architect, Chris Wiebe, designer], Canada

Finding roots in the formal geometries of the labyrinth and the many informal camping traditions in the Canadian landscape, TiiLT is a transformable, inhabitable and interactive place for visitors to be either active or idle.

Each structure may be flipped between two orientations, responding to the position of the sun, offering alternative views and shifting pathways through the site. The toggling movement conjures a school of fish, or a flock of birds, flitting in opposite directions yet connected as a whole. The straw-like lightness of the structures and brilliant yellow skin recall a field of floral blooms, contrasting the surrounding green landscape and blue sky.

The Reford Gardens International Garden Festival 2016 at Les Jardins de Métis in Québec , Canada, opens on May 28 and runs until October 2, 2016. Learn more at Reford Gardens