The 27th Edition of the International Garden Festival
6 hours ago
5 min read
The small community of Grand-Métis, located in the Lower St. Lawrence region of Québec, is hosting one of North America's most highly anticipated contemporary garden festivals, and this summer the site is filled with a lively, restless atmosphere. The 27th International Garden Festival blooms at Les Jardins de Métis, the well-known Reford Gardens, and will run until October 4, 2026.
Again, a Garden. Photography: JC Lemay
With the theme of Mapping Sensitivity, Artistic Director Ève De Garie-Lamanque invited designers from diverse backgrounds to craft gardens based on empathy, inclusivity, and a deep sense of connection.
The edition from last year, called Borders, looked at how space is divided—such as the lines on a map, geopolitical boundaries, and defined territories. This year the Festival is taking the contrary route. Mapping Sensitivity explores how a map would be like if it were based on memory, emotion, and experience rather than on coordinates.
As the Festival's curators explain, sensitive mapping is not in any real sense about maps; it is concerned with how a place feels — with its smell, the way the light falls over it, and the memories that each visitor has. From among 204 proposals coming from 29 countries, five have been selected to turn this concept into experiences that prompt visitors to wander rather than merely observe.
The Winning Projects and Designers
The clearest entry point for understanding the theme is Again, a Garden, designed by Winnipeg-born architect Hugh Taylor. It consists of a walled garden made from cut-down, fallen logs placed between aluminum plates, housing native pollinator species. Instead of concealing decay, the design makes it part of the story. Places to rest and reflect sit within a cycle in which growth and breakdown are a single, continuous system. Taylor, who holds a master's degree from Harvard and has worked with firms including Herzog & de Meuron, brings an architect's precision to material most people would consider spent.
Again, a Garden. Photography: JC Lemay Again, a Garden. Photography: JC Lemay
While Taylor's garden invites visitors to sit inside a cycle, Frame by architect Ulli Heckmann encourages them to look through it. The sculptural structure selects and highlights certain views and levels of intimacy, making the act of looking the piece’s main focus. Ulli Heckmann, who has managed his own architecture and design studio since 2013 and earlier built an installation for the International Garden Festival in Chaumont-sur-Loire, employs Frame to make visitors aware of their position—of what is revealed and what stays hidden.
Frame. Photography: JC Lemay Ulli Heckmann. Photography: Martin Bond Frame. Photography: JC Lemay
If Frame plays with sight, Mentho-artemision plays with everything else. French landscape designer Etienne Lapleau built the garden around mint and mugwort, two plants that grow in very different conditions, compressing the distance between their native habitats into one space. Visitors move amid shifts from dry to humid, registered by smell and touch as much as by eye. Lapleau's practice draws on the tradition of the botanist-gardener, treating plants less as decoration and more as a way to rethink how people relate to the ground beneath them.
Mentho-artemision. Photography: JC Lemay Mentho-artemision. Photography: JC Lemay Mentho-artemision. Photography by Martin Bond
Tainai-Meguri takes the sensory register somewhere less expected: the space where most people spend half their day inside without noticing, the screen. Designed by architect Clinton Cuddington of Measured Architecture alongside landscape designers Tamotsu Tongu and Kumpei Wakino, the piece imagines digital space as a cave, made tangible through a sweeping arbour of nature, water, and light. Tongu and Wakino bring two generations of Japanese landscape practice to Canada's West Coast. Their collaboration with Cuddington reads as a meditative return to origin, a rare garden built to counter a screen rather than resemble one.
Tainai-Meguri. Photography by: JC Lemay Tainai-Meguri. Photography by: Martin Bond Tainai-Meguri. Photography by: Martin Bond
Worm's Eye, by Chicago-based designer Ellen Harris, takes the festival's cartographic thread and turns it on its head. Drawing on political scientist James C. Scott's idea of the map as a tool of top-down control, Harris designed camouflage architecture that resists being read from above. The result is a garden built for an intimate, local, and necessarily partial understanding of place, the opposite of the aerial view most maps use.
Worm’s Eye. Photography by: JC Lemay Worm’s Eye. Photography by: JC Lemay Worm’s Eye. Photography by: JC Lemay
The festival's special project pushes the theme past sight altogether. Pousses de son, built by Rimouski-based sound artist Tom Jacques, treats sound as more than background, a signal so constant it tends to disappear. Working with the acoustics of its environment, the garden nudges visitors into a listening mode usually reserved for close, attentive walkers, changing how they take in everything else around them.
Pousses de son. Photography by: Martin Bond Pousses de son. Photography by: JC Lemay Pousses de son. Photo credit: Martin Bond Pousses de son. Photography by: JC Lemay
The identity tying the whole three-year cycle together comes from bureau60a, a Quebec studio led by Simon Guibord and Rachel Monnier. Their graphic language borrows from the symbols of modern cartography while leaning into something more organic: how pollen scatters and settles. That pairing — precise mapping conventions loosened by a biological process nobody can fully control — mirrors exactly what's happening in the gardens themselves.
Clinton Cuddington, Tamotsu Tongu, Kumpei Wakino. Photo credit: Martin Bond Ellen Harris. Photography by: Martin Bond Etienne Lapleau. Phtography by: Martin Bond Hugh Taylor. Photography by: Martin Bond Tom Jacques. Phtography by: Martin Bond
