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.
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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- 15 July 2016
- Grand-Métis
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.
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.
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.
17th International Garden Festival
Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens
200, route 132
Grand-Métis, Quebec
Canada