Explore five new featured projects showcased at the 24th International Garden Festival

Earlier this year, the Bustler team reported on the upcoming projects set to be featured at the 24th edition of the International Garden Festival at Reford Gardens in Grand-Métis, Quebec. This year's theme, ROOTS, invited designers to "imagine a present and a future that is ecologically, economically, and culturally responsible by drawing on the teachings of past generations."

The festival's 2023 edition consists of 22 original and unmoved contemporary gardens as well as five new design projects in addition to two stand-alone installations: Mer du Vent and Absolues Jardin. 

Le Jardin des quatre colonnes 
By Vincent Dumay and Baptiste Wullschleger (Sweden + France)

Project excerpt: " Le Jardin des quatre colonnes is an experience that unfolds through time, where elements built with raw earth within a living environment will evolve freely over the years. Adobe construction is a technique that consists in compacting soil mixed with moisture in successive layers inside a casing – it makes visible what normally lies hidden beneath our feet. The fluted boles are built using a tubular casing which gives them their specific shape evoking Doric columns." 

Maillage
By Friche Atelier: Frédérique Allard, Jean-Jacques Yervant, Aliénor de Montalivet (Quebec, Canada) 

Project excerpt: "The use of plants is at the heart of the development of our civilizations. Whether for nourishment, protection, healing, or clothing, their multiple applications have allowed populations to survive and prosper [...] Maillage explores on a metaphorical level the relation between two worlds, that of the textile, and that of the vegetal."

Matière-Matière
By Studio Haricot: Marie-Pier Caron-Desrochers and Tristan Morissette, Rose-Marie Guévin, Vincent Ouellet (Quebec, Canada)

Project excerpt: "Matière-Matière is the intrinsic experience of a tone-on-tone relation (texture upon texture, color upon color): volumes emerge like fruits from the site, as extensions of the vegetation. Three walls bend, converge, and project themselves, dilating and contracting. The project is an invitation to tactilely feel one’s way through a materiality stripped bare, inside moments of uncanny encounters. This structure of hemp concrete, deposited in the context of a patch of wheat and a carpet of mulch, offers a parallel between the possible transformations of vegetal fibers up to the materialization of the proposed spaces."

Racines de mer
By Cassandra Ducharme-Martin and Gabriel Demeule (Quebec, Canada)

Project excerpt: " In a climate similar to ours, on the island of Læsø in Denmark, women built, with the help of eelgrass, a marine plant, the roofs of their houses. Due to the waterproof and fireproof properties of these marine plants harvested on beaches, these roofs have resisted the ravages of time for more than three hundred years. Racines de mer proposes a reflection on the built environment of the future. It offers the visitor the possibility of discovering Quebec’s territory and traditional skills." 

S’Y RETROUVER
By Jinny Yu, Ki Jun Kim, and Frédéric Pitre  (Ontario & Quebec, Canada + Germany) 

Project excerpt: "Visitors are invited to enter a submerged maze: a puzzle with various possible routes and dead ends meant to confuse and challenge those who explore. At the same time, the top of the wall of the trenches, which is at ground level, allows for the possibility of deciphering the pathway with an overall view of the route before entering. Upon entering the subterranean world, visitors reach the first level of the substratum of the root system, and walk around a network composed of earth and white clover representing the pattern of the roots of two trees linked by fungal mycelium [...] S’Y RETROUVER invites visitors to slow down and reflect both on the root system and issues of colonialism."

Learn more about International Garden Festival, other garden designs, and installations here.