Five landscape design teams and architects have been named the winners of the prestigious 2016 International Garden Festival.
The successful studios – who hail from Canada, the United States, France and Switzerland – will display their verdant creations at the Redford Gardens in Quebec, Canada, along with 22 other gardens designed by more than 80 landscape architects, architects and designers.
Over 203 entries from 31 countries were submitted to the competition.
Since its inception in 2000, more than 150 gardens have been exhibited at the annual festival, which is hosted on a site adjacent to the famous gardens created by Canadian horticulturist Elsie Reford from 1926 to 1958.
The five winning gardens, with explanations from their creators, are listed below.
Cyclops by Craig Chapple from Arizona, United States
"Cyclops is a singular object on the landscape as well as a singular frame of the landscape. Made up of 258 eight-metre long timber boards, they are held in a concentric circle by two steel rings suspended from the surrounding trees by stainless steel cables.
"Cyclops is held in a tenuous balance with the environment that provides for it. The central opening at the bottom of the cone is a highly-charged occupiable space for the viewer to both view the canopy in a new way but also truly feel 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 by Romy Brosseau, Rosemarie Faille-Faubert and Émilie Gagné-Lorange from Quebec
"La maison de Jacques (or Jack’s House) references the children’s fable Jack and the Beanstalk and you might think you have just stepped out of a children’s story. The house is a green grove that is enveloped in bloom. You enter by walking on stepping stones and wander between rows of beans, tightly winding their way up a light wooden structure. The walls divide the space into a series of small hidden gardens, singular in their proportions. These cocoons are ideal hiding places for a game of hide-and-seek.
"La maison de Jacques is magical. It will be built over several weeks, starting with the seedlings in May that will grow to be more than three metres in height in a short time. Their clumps of red flowers will be in bloom by the end of July and then the beans will form to bring a taste of goodness to everyone."
Carbone by Coache Lacaille Paysagistes studio from Nantes, France
“This installation evokes the cycle of production as a parallel to the carbon cycle and explores whether a garden is landscaped or a landscape gardened.
"A sculpted tree trunk, partially cut into pieces, helps to illustrate the primary material used to build furniture. It is cut into parts and shows the journey from root to stump to its final use. A young tree grows where the tree might have grown tall had it not fallen.
"Regenerating the forest and sowing where we have harvested brings nature back to life, transmitting the love of landscape to those who will outlive us.
"A noble and familiar material, wood is our crib, our bed, our coffin. Cutting a tree, removing it from the forest – in itself a vast garden – is the fruit of our labour. It is the result of the work of those who came before us, who planted a seed and provide us today with the wood that gives us rest."
TiiLT by SRCW from Winnipeg, Canada
“Finding roots in the formal geometries of the labyrinth and the many informal camping traditions in the Canadian landscape, TiiLT is a transformable and inhabitable place for visitors to act, or to idle, however they may be inclined.
“Each structure may be flipped between two orientations, responding to the position of the sun, offering alternating 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.
“TiiLT challenges the notion of the garden in creating an interactive environment that is part sculpture and part landscape - to evoke a sense of place and beauty from modest elements. TiiLT provides simple, intimate, shaded spaces in congregation, retrieving memories of long days in short seasons, time spent alone and among neighbours, embracing the feeling of shared disconnection, together.”
Le caveau by Christian Poule from Basel, Switzerland
“A growing plane is shrouded in the intimacy of Le caveau (the cave) – a four-sided room of stacked gabions full of stones. It is a room of reflection. It is a room for dreamers. Just as the plane levitates before us, we are held in the balance of the stone and life itself. The personification of our own imaginations suspended in time. The primitive plane symbolises a beginning - the seed and the soil, the tilted horizon between earth and sky.”
