These are the four projects selected to feature at the 26th International Garden Festival

The projects selected as part of this year’s International Garden Festival have been announced ahead of the event’s 26th edition. 

United by the theme Borders, the festival will run from June 21st to October 5th, 2025, at Reford Gardens in Grand-Métis, Quebec. Artistic Director Ève De Garie-Lamanque has invited participants to "rethink the notion of border in today’s postcolonial context and to transpose these reflections into a garden environment that blurs disciplines." 

The four projects selected were taken from a total field of 180 submissions by designers from 27 countries. The lineup for the 2025 International Garden Festival includes:

BACK / GROUND by Patrick Bérubé | Québec, Canada

Description: "One of the great disasters of our times – aside from climate change – has been wrought in large part by the emergence of private property. The advent of domestication, then of agriculture, marked a major turning point in human history, following which people sought to control ecosystems and their cycles. BACK / GROUND triggers reconsideration of human activities and their environmental and social impacts. What emerges is a vision of the world in which nature is not simply a background but a living environment of which human beings are an integral part and from which they can dissociate themselves only through artifice or delusion."

Peek-a-Boo by Hermine Demaël, Stephen Zimmerer | Quebec, Canada + United States

Description: "A border separates inside from outside, interior from exterior, self from other. When realized, that crudely drawn border occupies a thickened edge. What does it mean to spend time at the edge, to invest this liminal space? Architecture is defined through the articulation of walls and enclosures. Peek-a-Boo flips one such border on its side to interrogate the edge between earth and sky, articulated as a colorful field of powder-coated steel grates. Four windows become trap doors which invite play, movement, and interaction. Between open and closed states, they suggest thirteen spatial configurations – a garden constantly in motion."

You Shall (Not) Pass by Simon Barrette | Quebec, Canada

Description: "In You Shall (Not) Pass, Simon Barrette challenges the limits, both visible and invisible, that map our environments, relationships, possessions, and thoughts. Composed of thousands of surveying markers strung onto steel wire – of the type used by surveyors to physically mark the edges of a property – the oversized bead curtain hangs in the middle of the forest. The monolithic installation cleaves the landscape, conjuring up the very archetype of a border."

Scars of Conflict by Michael Hyttel Thorø | Denmark

Description: "Scars of Conflict is inspired by the physical devastation and psychological scars left by warfare. In the First World War, battles between warring nations left behind remarkable and nearly unrecognizable landscapes due to the intense artillery barrages. These landscapes reflect how borders—political, geographical, and cultural—can be violently reshaped by conflict, erasing our shared memories. Today, post-war sites serve a memorial purpose. They stand as symbols of resilience in the face of hardship."