A Festival that Bridges History and Modern Landscaping

The International Garden Festival is launching a call for proposals to select 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.

Aerial View - International Garden Festival 2024
Photo credit: Jean-Christophe Lemay

2025 theme – BORDERS

Borders partition a whole, giving it a value of its own. Tangible, while not 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.

"Bruissement d'ailes", 2024 - Bernard Chapuis & Georges Vafia, Festival International des Jardins du Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire
Photo credit: Jean-Christophe Lemay

"FUTURE DRIFTS", 2024 - Julia Lines Wilson
Photo credit: Jean-Christophe Lemay

Application

Deadline to Submit Proposals

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 at 17:00 EST. Applications submitted after the deadline will not be accepted.

Eligibility of Candidates

This call for proposals is open to all landscape architects, architects, visual artists, and multidisciplinary teams from Canada and abroad. The Festival encourages participants to form multidisciplinary teams. Applicants are limited to one proposal, either as individuals or as a team. Participants can be from a single city or country, or cross international boundaries. Designers will be asked to imagine their garden for exhibition for at least two summers, and to propose strategies for the repurposing or recycling of the garden or its materials after the end of its exhibition.

All details are available on the website.

International Garden Festival

Created at the turn of the new millennium by Marie-Josée Lacroix, Denis Lemieux, Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec, and Alexander Reford, the International Garden Festival is recognized as one of the most important contemporary garden festivals in North America. Since its inception in 2000, nearly 190 contemporary gardens have been exhibited at Grand-Métis, and as extramural projects in Canada and around the world. Presented at Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens, at the gateway to the Gaspé Peninsula, the Festival is held on a site adjacent to the historic gardens created by Elsie Reford, thereby establishing a bridge between history and modernity, and a dialogue between conservation, tradition, and innovation.

Each year the Festival exhibits over 20 conceptual gardens created by more than 70 landscape architects, architects, and designers from various disciplines. Over the years, the Festival has received numerous distinctions, including the Hector-Fabre Award (2007), given out every two years by the Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie to an organization that has contributed to the international renown of its region.