Every summer since 2000, the International Garden Festival has transformed the Reford Gardens into a laboratory for creative landscape design. For its 28th edition, the Festival invites landscape architects, architects, artists, and multidisciplinary teams from all over the world to propose concepts for five new gardens. The Festival’s next edition will open on Saturday, June 19, 2027, at Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens, in Québec’s Gaspésie tourist region.

2027 Theme: Making Visible: Alternative Geographies

The triennial thematic cycle centred around human beings’ relationship with space and territory, conceived by the Festival’s artistic director, Ève De Garie-Lamanque, concludes in 2027.

In 2025, Borders focused on issues arising from the representation, organization, and management of geographic space, drawing on concerns involved with geopolitics and private property. In 2026, Mapping Sensitivity addressed the immaterial and affective aspects of territory by encouraging a relational dynamic and returning users to the foreground.

This new call for projects, with the theme Making Visible: Alternative Geographies, will ultimately lead to the selection of four or five contemporary garden projects that will extend – and reveal the shortfalls of – the reflections undertaken during the preceding editions.

Emerging at the confluence of Borders and Mapping Sensitivity, this new theme probes mechanisms, approaches, and systems that have become the norm. Approaches will draw on the concepts of intersectionality (a theoretical framework introduced in 1989 by the American jurist Kimberlé W. Crenshaw) and counter-mapping (a term coined in 1995 by the American sociologist Nancy Lee Peluso). Both of these concepts have contributed, among other things, to providing marginalized or traditionally underrepresented individuals and communities with voice and visibility.

To ensure complementarity – in both substance and form – with the projects chosen for the first two years of the thematic cycle, the designers are encouraged to consult the web pages and press releases for the Festival’s 26th and 27th editions.

The projects selected will be revealed to the public in February 2027.

“Once again, artists are invited to transpose their ideas into an experimental garden that bursts through boundaries, revisits ideas about landscape and territory, and engages the public in an active encounter,” stated Alexander Reford, co-founder and director, International Garden Festival. “The International Garden Festival is an exceptional laboratory for creativity in which landscape architecture, art, and design are tested on a life-size scale, in a location that features almost a century of horticultural history and the force of the St. Lawrence River. It is in this dialogue between heritage and avant-garde that tomorrow’s landscapes are imagined for our visitors to enjoy.”

Applicant Eligibility

This call for projects is open to landscape architects, architects, visual artists, and multidisciplinary teams from Canada and abroad. The Festival encourages the formation of teams bringing together several disciplines. Individuals and teams may submit only one proposal, and the participants may come from the same city or country or from different world regions.

Applicants are asked to design a garden that falls within one or another of the Festival’s subject areas. Once the winning projects are selected, the Festival’s artistic and technical committees will determine, in collaboration with the designers, which site will best highlight each project. Applicants are asked to design a garden that will be presented for at least two summers and to propose strategies for repurposing, reusing, or recycling its materials once its presentation ends.

The selected projects will receive artistic and technical guidance and a production budget.