What role does a garden play in the world today? Does it have a social responsibility? A garden, whether public or private, is a sustainable, nurtured environment that harbours biodiversity: the plants are selected after careful consideration of their needs; the site is developed to suit specific behaviours and the evolution through multiple seasons is closely studied. Hence, the garden and the process of its realisation is an intersection of several disciplines—a culmination of a cross-disciplinary approach. The 25^th edition of the International Garden Festival, now unfolding in Quebec, Canada, imagines the future of gardens with the theme The Ecology of Possibility.

Deemed one of the most important contemporary garden festivals in North America, the showcase is held on a National Historic Site of Canada and a Quebec heritage site: Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens. Adjacent to the historic gardens created by Elsie Reford, the design festival reveals a dialogue between the past and the present. This year’s edition, taking the stage from June 22 - October 6, 2024, presents 27 contemporary gardens including six new additions to the site, a permanent installation titled Pergola and two extramural projects. From a recreation of a Belgian garden to a garden inviting moments of presence, STIR delves into the new onsite projects and gardens partaking in the festival.

Bruissement d’ailes

This project by France-based Festival International des Jardins, Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, this garden urges visitors to be as close as possible to their natural environments. Dubbed Bruissement d’ailes, the project reiterates the need to revive our relationship with nature. Climate change, destruction of natural habitats, imbalance and uncertainty have now become a pressing reality, one that calls for adaptation and reconsideration. The damages of rising temperatures need to be curtailed through rethinking behaviour, battling heat islands and utilising new or traditional ways to address water and shade scarcity. In this context, Bruissement d’ailes invites visitors to pause under the shade of three intricate sails outstretched over a water lily pond and contemplate their innate ties to their surroundings.

Couleur Nature

“Coming together around a swimming pool or manicured lawn is not the same as coming together in a garden - the environments provoke different activities, different states of mind and different paces,” reads the official release for Couleur Nature, a project introduced in the latest edition of the International Garden Festival. Contrived by Vanderveken, Architecture + Paysage, a practice helmed by landscape architect Guillaume Vanderveken, the interactive installation compares the utilitarian lawn and individual leisure devices (with poor social and ecological indicators) with contemplative gardens (with high reflexive and ecological indicators). The two distinct visions of the garden are juxtaposed to emphasise how the dominant monoculture serves no purpose apart from offering the transitory satisfaction of an endless cycle of watering, mowing and filling their swimming pools - subsequently contributing to the decline of biodiversity. The visitors experience surprise as they transition from a sanitised and watered-down outdoor to an unkempt, ever-changing indoor space, urged to ponder over their relationship with time and the environment.

FUTURE DRIFTS

The Anticosti Aster (symphyotrichum anticostense), a cross between New York (symphyotrichum novi-belgii var. novi-belgii) and Rush (symphyotrichum boreale) Asters, was recognised as a priority plant species for habitat protection in the St. Lawrence Vision 2000 Action Plan. Despite 25 years of habitat protection efforts, the Anticosti and Rush Asters continue to be endangered. FUTURE DRIFTS by Julia Lines Wilson, a landscape architect based in the United States, poses a question for the future: if New York and Rush Asters cross again, what are the possibilities of these interactions? Visitors meander through the landscape design immersed in drifts of Asters, the woven dune fencing guides the visitors in tandem with providing a path that asters and other vegetation can grow between. Recurring foot traffic on the path defines how far the plants can drift.

Superstrata

Superstrata by mat-on, an Italy-based collaborative practice between Matteo Fontana and Mattia Mattiuzzi, draws from the concept of the rhizomatic system, theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, where hierarchies are replaced by ‘horizontality’ and new ways of exchanging knowledge, connections and possibilities. The proposal highlights the contradiction between the human need to impose order and nature’s knack for defying fixed structures and linearity. In the immersive installation using a geological map as a metaphor, the visitors will experience this duality as they move through a permeable grid and the intersections of map lines assume a solid third-dimensional form. The public art morphs into an opportunity to learn from nature and acknowledge the dynamic and interconnected nature of interactions between human and non-human entities.

Rue Liereman | Organ Man Street

Pioniersplanters, a Belgian collective of three creator-artists—Laurens Decoster, Bert Joostens and Sander Wallays—join the festival with Rue Liereman | Organ Man Street. The creators are driven by the observation that in a densely populated and urbanised area such as Flanders, the fraction of land occupied by domestic or private gardens is four times the total surface area of non-residential natural areas in the region. The Belgian garden touches upon the potential of domestic gardens to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis and enhance biodiversity. “Extracted from the urban fabric of a medium-sized European city and implanted in Grand-Métis, the installation becomes a mise en abyme, a garden within a garden - an entirely new entity in the Canadian landscape,” states the official release.

Pergola

Marking its 25th anniversary, the International Garden Festival invited Jérôme Lapierre Architecte to design a small pavilion as the entrance. Titled Pergola, the permanent installation reimagines the small garden structure conceived to provide shade and support for climbing plants. Composed of thin walls of interwoven red oak slats, the pavilion design aims to celebrate the play of light and shadow in the surrounding gardens, laying bare the beauty of the site.

Histoires à tisser

This stand-alone installation by Shaza Bazzi and Maëlle Bellemin invites visitors into its dense canopy, offering a space to be rooted in the present moment. Employing rope recuperated from the Augmented Grounds garden, Histoires à tisser features two circular modules—speaking of what links humans to each other, irrespective of their origins. The threads of the past weave new present narratives as the visitors sit between two net meshes and engage in the web of stories. The installation is co-presented by the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and the Partenariat du Quartier des spectacles, in partnership with the Reford Gardens, under the supervision of Professor Céline Poisson.