By Anne Marie Van Nest

During the summer of 2000, Reford Gardens was the home of the International Garden Festival, a North American first. The Festival featured some of the world's most innovative landscape architects and designers from the U. K., France, the U.S. and Canada. These designers created nine temporary gardens that acted as a bridge between the traditional gardens of Elsie Reford and modernistic garden expression as an art. The local Quebec environment was the inspiration for each garden, and several paid homage, in their particular fashion, to Elsie's historical gardens. The Festival was a forum for innovation and the results were quite striking. Claude Cormier created an allée of blue sticks that changed colour once visitors walked through the garden to a dead-end and made a U-turn. Susan Herrington, from British Columbia, created a garden called "Surf and Turf" where she directed visitors through a vertical lawn to experience the transition to surf. Bernard Saint-Denis and Peter Fianu designed an outdoor living room. The living room garden was created to reveal the paradoxical relationships we have with nature. These relationships are exemplified most clearly in the backyard garden. Even as our lives become increasingly dominated by technology and cyberspace, people are becoming more interested in gardening and the search for pristine wilderness. It is this tension in our relationship with nature that the designers used in their poetic garden room. The garden is a highly artificial environment constructed of natural materials that caricatures our attempts to return to nature in our domestic gardens. To portray this theme, the designers created an enclosed room with sod walls. Visitors entered through a large culvert tunnel and were surprised to find themselves in a truly "living room." An inflatable couch welcomed them to sit and watch a working television inserted into one of the grass walls.

     Marie-Chrystine Landry, a sculptor from Quebec created "Le jardin des appels" (the garden of the call). The garden featured an SOS code of three long, three short, three long and a pause. This was represented through rows of plants. She used upright junipers and low silver foliage artemisia. The SOS signal plants rose up a launching ramp and seem to tumble off into a pool of blue recycled glass. The SOS distress signal has specific meaning to the area because of the history of navigation on the nearby St. Lawrence and the maritime disasters, which have marked its history.

     The three Ontario members of PLANT/BranchPlant were all educated as architects and have now introduced work with the landscape to their portfolio. To get ideas for their garden, one of the team members laid down on the site and looked up at the clouds. He was wowed by the sight and wanted to create a garden that causes visitors to relax and enjoy nature. In their garden called "Le jardin du repos" (the garden of rest), all materials were gathered from the area. Shells were used for the path and as mulch for the garden. The design team created three pieces of site-specific furniture, which allowed visitors to enjoy their garden and the landscape beyond in different and complementary ways. The main axis of the garden held a monumental rectangular stone bed (with a stone pillow) where visitors could lay back and look at the blue sky, feel the wind and soak up the sun's rays. Surrounding the stone bed was a restful planting of low silver-leaved artemisia. In the northwest corner was an over-sized chaise lounge next to a fence made of straw. The lounge chair was positioned to reveal a surprise view of the steep slope down to the wave-washed beach. On the opposite side of the garden was a semi-circular bench made from rounded logs.

     The 2000 launch of the first edition of the International Garden Festival was a very important moment in the development of Reford Gardens. The garden's staff sought to become an internationally recognized centre for garden design, training and research relating to the landscape, with it already having a reputation as a leader in environmental understanding and awareness. The International Garden Festival will see new designs created each year, challenging designers to reinvent the meaning of a garden. This hotbed of new ideas is a startling contrast to the historical gardens created by Elsie Reford. Plans are already in place to expand the Festival for 2001. Alexander Reford commented to a group of visiting garden writers that he wants the Festival to be a destination that offers something different in order to attract visitors from Montreal (600 km away).


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Reford Gardens bridges culture and time.