International Garden Festival. Photo credit: Jean-Christophe Lemay
The International Garden Festival is launching a call for proposals to choose designers to create the new temporary gardens for the Festival?s 26th edition, which will open on June 20, 2025, on the site of Les Jardins de Métis | Reford Gardens.
This year’s theme is “Borders” which invites designers to “rethink the notion of borders in today’s post-colonial context, and to transpose their reflections into a garden-environment that blurs disciplines, renegotiates preconceived ideas about the garden/landscape, and actively dialogues with the visitor.”
“Borders partition a whole, giving it a value of its own. Tangible without necessarily visible, they mark a distinction of state, nature and materiality. They ‘separate’ digital from analog, inside from outside, garden from expanse, landscape from geography. Sometimes fixed, rigid or more or less hermetic, they can also be porous, ambiguous or multiple. Constantly renegotiated, borders also act as passageways, places of encounter and exchange,” reads the Festival’s website. Created by Marie-Josée Lacroix, Denis Lemieux, Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec and Alexander Reford, the International Garden Festival is now the most important contemporary garden festival in North America. Since its first edition, almost 190 gardens have been presented at Grand-Métis and in extramural venues in Canada and abroa...