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17th Garden Festival

Organic installations, secret gardens and ancestral forests: the summer event at the Reford Gardens in Quebec hosts the 17th edition of the International Garden Festival.

The International Garden Festival invites visitors to explore twenty-six interactive garden installations created by seventy-two landscape architects, architects, designers and visual artists from nine countries. For the 17th edition, five new creations by designers from Canada, the United States, France and Switzerland will join the temporary installations on view and a sixth will be exhibited at special events throughout the summer.

Craig Chapple, Cyclops, Phoenix, Arizona, United States — **Top:** Christian Poules, *Le Caveau*, Basel, Switzerland. A simple room of stone and earth a place for reflection and a room for dreamers. Christian Poules is both an architect and landscape architect who constructs poetic places in the balance of the two disciplines. **Above:** Craig Chapple, *Cyclops*, Phoenix, Arizona, United States. is made up of 100 8-meter long tapering timber planks held in the shape of an inverted cone around a central opening for the user to occupy. Formally trained as an architect at Yale University but with a deep commitment to creating art, Craig Chapple has pursued both architecture and the visual arts simultaneously throughout his career.

The International Garden Festival is a leading contemporary garden festival in North America. Since its inception in 2000, more than 150 gardens have been exhibited at Grand-Métis and as extra-mural projects in Canada and around the world.

Romy Brosseau, Rosemarie Faille-Faubert, Émilie Gagné-Loranger, La Maison de Jacques, Québec Canada, 2016 — Romy Brosseau, Rosemarie Faille-Faubert, Émilie Gagné-Loranger, *La Maison de Jacques*, Québec, Canada. The house is a green grove that is enveloped in bloom, and the walls divide the space into a series of small hidden gardens, singular in their proportions. Graduates in the master’s program in architecture at the Université Laval in Quebec City, are working together for the first time

Presented at Les Jardins de Métis – National Historic Site and Québec heritage site–, at the gateway to the Gaspé Peninsula, the Festival is held on a site adjacent to the historic gardens created by Elsie Reford, thereby establishing a bridge between history and modernity, and a dialogue between conservation, tradition and innovation. Each year the Festival exhibits conceptual gardens created by more than seventy architects, landscape architects and designers from various disciplines in a pristine environment on the banks of the St. Lawrence River.

SRCW, <i>TiiLT</i>, Winnipeg (Manitoba) Canada — Sean Radford, Chris Wiebe from SRCW, *TiiLT*, Winnipeg (Manitoba) Canada. It challenges the notion of the garden in creating an interactive environment that is part sculpture and part landscape. SRCW regards the built form as an instigator of ideas, a generator for reinterpretation of the phenomena of everyday experience

Five new gardens of the 2016 edition of the Festival were selected by the jury from 203 projects submitted from 31 countries for the annual competition. Le Caveau, by Christian Poules, is a complex construction made of stone gabions that support a levitating green platform. Cyclops, by Craig Chapple, is gargantuan cone 8 metres in diameter suspended over the forest floor. The Maison De Jacques, by Romy Brosseau, Rosemarie Faille-Faubert, Émilie Gagné-Loranger, provides a happy home to a forest of beans where children can play hide-and-seek in one of many secret gardens. In TiiLT by SRCW (Sean Radford, Chris Wiebe) 24 tents populate a space like a school of fish or a flock of birds. Carbone, by Coache Lacaille Paysagistes (Maxime Coache, Victor Lacaille, Luc Dallanora) offers a charred tree trunk, capturing carbon during its entire life and contributing to the renaissance of the forest.

Coache Lacaille Paysagistes, Carbone, Nantes, France. This installation evokes the cycle of production as a parallel to the carbon cycle, the garden landscaped or the landscape gardened.

Coache Lacaille Paysagistes, Carbone, 17th International Garden Festival, Grand-Métis, Quebec, 2016

Christian Poules, Le Caveau, 17th International Garden Festival, Grand-Métis, Quebec, 2016

Craig Chapple, Cyclops, 17mo Festival Internazionale del Giardino, Grand-Métis, Quebec, 2016

Craig Chapple, Cyclops, 17th International Garden Festival, Grand-Métis, Quebec, 2016

Craig Chapple, Cyclops, 17th International Garden Festival, Grand-Métis, Quebec, 2016

Romy Brosseau, Rosemarie Faille-Faubert, Émilie Gagné-Loranger, La Maison de Jacques, 17th International Garden Festival, Grand-Métis, Quebec, 2016

Romy Brosseau, Rosemarie Faille-Faubert, Émilie Gagné-Loranger, La Maison de Jacques, 17th International Garden Festival, Grand-Métis, Quebec, 2016

Sean Radford, Chris Wiebe from SRCW, TiiLT, 17th International Garden Festival, Grand-Métis, Quebec, 2016

Sean Radford, Chris Wiebe from SRCW, TiiLT, 17th International Garden Festival, Grand-Métis, Quebec, 2016

17th International Garden Festival
Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens
200, route 132
Grand-Métis, Quebec
Canada

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17th Garden Festival

Organic installations, secret gardens and ancestral forests: the summer event at the Reford Gardens in Quebec hosts the 17th edition of the International Garden Festival.

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