Participatory gardens central to the 16th International Garden Festival
The International Garden Festival opens its 16th edition with six new gardens by designers from Tel Aviv, Paris, Winnipeg and Québec City, chosen from 309 proposals submitted from designers around the world. Many of the ephemeral gardens of the 2015 edition are interactive.
Se mouiller (la belle échappée) by Québec City-based Groupe A / Annexe U [Jean-François Laroche, Rémi Morency, érick Rivard & Maxime Rousseau], 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.
Around-About, is by Tel Aviv-based Talmon Biran architecture studio [Roy Talmon & Noa Biran]. 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.
Carré bleu sur fond blanc, by Paris-based Kihan Kim & Ophélie Bouvet, installed a white surface over a 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.
A special invitation was offered to Pete North and his master’s degree students in landscape architecture at the University of Toronto to create the garden Macro / Micro / Myco. 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.
Popple, by Meaghan Hunter & Suzy Melo, from Winnipeg, 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.
I like to move it is by DIXNEUFCENTQUATREVINGTSIX Architecture, from Paris. 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.
