The International Garden Festival is pleased to unveil the names of the new designers and their gardens chosen for the 22nd edition of the Festival. Five new projects fromCanada, the United States, France and Sweden have been selected to be featured at the 2021 edition of the International Garden Festival.

The theme for the 2021 edition is Magic Lies Outside. This year’s festival strives to bring us hope, to inspire creativity, and to brighten up the world as we struggle to make it through the global pandemic and get back on our feet after many difficult months of lockdown. The five projects selected this year will be integrated around the existing gardens to create an open-air museum for visitors to explore. 

The new gardens will be on exhibit at Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens from Saturday, June 26 to Sunday, October 3, 2021. For its 22nd edition, visitors will enjoy more than 25 gardens, each one pushing the frontiers of contemporary design and offering a unique mix of curated environments, natural experiences, horticultural staging and human creativity.

A total of 160 projects by designers from 17 countries were submitted.

The five new gardens selected for the 2021 edition are:

Choose your Own Adventure

Balmori Associates [Noémie Lafaurie-Debany, Javier Gonzalez-Campana, Simon Escabi, Chris Liao, Cristina Preciado, landscape and urban designers]

New York, United States

In the middle of a global pandemic brought upon us in part by global warming and its undeniable effects on all living things, fighting climate change by modifying our current toxic relationship with other living things and elements of nature: soil, water, air, plants and animals is now critical. Rethinking our connection to nature, after living in lockdown, can start with appreciating natural phenomena: the gusty wind, the wet bark, the musky shade, the dry air, the sweet smell, the hot stone, the crunchy gravels… The garden challenges the still frame images posted on the world wide web reminiscent of the eighteenth century picturesque. Malcolm Andrews described tourists seeking the ideal landscapes as “‘fixing’ them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing room walls” (aka Instagram of the twenty-first century!). But a landscape never happens twice, and its lack of fixity and hyper sensorial experiences are heightened through this simple matrix that forms the garden. Running East/West bands of planting intercepts North/South bands of different hard materials. CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE, smell, touch, listen, taste and see.  

Hässja

Emil Bäckström, architect

Stockholm, Sweden

You can see them from afar, unknown, yet familiar creatures standing in the field – seemingly waiting. They catch sunlight and emit a warm golden glow. The wind makes them move slightly. You see them in a constellation, grouped together, but never too close to each other. They are the same kind, but each and every one of them have their unique shape and expression. A piece of nature that has been transformed into something living. When you get close enough, you can see that the creatures are made up of millions of individual objects, stalks of hay. Moving closer, you can feel the distinct smell and you can touch the both sharp and soft flesh of the structures. And then you crawl inside. The Covid-19 pandemic has taught us a lot. It has exposed a disconnection from nature, agriculture and the importance of biodiversity. All around the globe, a regained interest in traditional, sustainable ways of inhabiting the earth is emerging. Hässja is an installation based on one of these nearly lost arts of working the soil – hay-drying structures. The three structures, made out of the very plants surrounding them, are not only educational, they are formed and arranged in a way that enhances their inherited visceral qualities. Unlike normal hay-drying structures, these have an interior room. The small space inside each provides a refuge from the world of today, and provides for reflection on man’s relation to nature, to past and future ways of inhabiting our land. 

Miroirs acoustiques

Emmanuelle Loslier, landscape architect, Camille Zaroubi, landscape architect

Montreal (Quebec) Canada

Sound mirrors are passive devices used to reflect and focus sound waves. Historically, they were implemented across the coast of Great Britain during World War I to detect incoming enemy aircraft. Sound waves bounce off the parabolic reflector and meet at the focal point where they are amplified, creating the illusion that whatever is making the sound is right next to you. Miroirs acoustiques consists of two parabolic reflectors (recycled aluminum antennas) planted in the ground. Positioned back-to-back, one points to the festival, an anthropogenic environment, and the other points to a forested area and the St. Lawrence. Visitors are invited to experience the two contrasting soundscapes.

The focal point is marked on the ground showing visitors where to stand. A hole in the centre of the sound mirrors encourages visitors to observe the environment on the other side of the installation and, in doing so, places them in the optimal position to hear the focused sound waves.

Open Space

legaga [Gabriel Lemelin, Francis Gaignard, Sandrine Gaulin, interns in architecture]

Quebec (Quebec) Canada

The title of this garden says it all — this installation is a figurative and literal open space. In Open Space, the walls of a typical house are opened out to create an open floor plan with endless possibilities. With a flick of a wand, everyday household objects—doors, staircases, windows and walls—take on new meaning. We can walk up and down the walls, dangle our feet through the door, stand and chat around the staircase, sit on the fireplace, the possibilities really are endless. In the past year, houses have become a symbol of lockdown. In Open Space, they go back to being a fun, safe and familiar place where you can let your imagination run wild. And when you let your imagination run wild, you can find magic anywhere.

Porte-bonheur

David Bonnard, architect DE-HMONP, Laura Giuliani, landscaper, Amélie Viale, visual artist

Lyon, Villefranche sur Saône et Lissieu, France

Doors have long been considered a departure point, a gateway to step through on our way to adventure. Yet in the past year, doors have taken on a different meaning. Rather than throwing the door open and heading to adventure, our doors have remained firmly shut, keeping us apart from the people we love.

Porte Bonheur is a rite of passage between reality and potentiality. The installation invites visitors to dare to throw open the door, to cross thresholds, to go outside and to explore their surroundings with all the wonder of a small child. A reawakening through subtle distortion where a door—our daily symbol of lockdown—becomes something virtual and gradually disappears as the visitor wanders through the installation towards a new horizon. A natural, peaceful horizon, because there’s no doubt about it, the magic is outdoors.

Two projects received a special mention from the jury:

Bonheur plat

Céline Arnaudeau, multidisciplinary designer, Marc-Antoine Goyette, designer and traditional carpenter

Montreal (Quebec) Canada

(in) between soils

ONE-AFTR [Joon Ma, architect, Ryu Ahn, architect]

Boston and New York, United States 

The jury was composed of: 

Lydia Brown, producer and lawyer, secretary of the Board of Directors of the International Garden Festival

Marie-Claude Massicotte, Senior Landscape Architect, AAPQ AAPC, consultant and chargée de cours at the Université de Montréal

Kiel Moe, architect, Gerald Sheff Chair of Architecture, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University

François Leblanc, Technical Coordinator, International Garden Festival

Alexander Reford, Director, Reford Gardens and International Garden Festival

The proposals submitted to the 2021 competition are exhibited online at: www.festivalinternationaldejardins.com  

About International Garden Festival

Since the first edition of the Festival 21 years ago, over one million visitors have enjoyed, explored and been moved and inspired by almost 200 exciting and innovative installations. The International Garden Festival is a blank canvas for architects and landscape architects to develop new ways of perceiving and designing public spaces.

The Festival is presented with the support of: Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and Emploi-Québec.

Hydro-Québec has been a major partner of the Reford Gardens since 1999.

About Reford Gardens

Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens are located on the shores of the St. Lawrence and Mitis rivers in Québec, Canada. Created from 1926 to 1958 by avid gardener and plant collector, Elsie Reford, the gardens are a national historic site designated. Les Jardins de Métis are considered one of the premier gardens in North America. They are an obligatory stop for all those visiting eastern Québec and the Gaspésie region. 

Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens are open every day from Saturday, May 29 to Sunday, October 3, 2021. Visit the www.refordgardens.com for more details.