The International Garden Festival is presenting a new garden by Montréal landscape architects NIPpaysage at the inaugural edition of the new Chelsea Fringe garden festival in London, United Kingdom, from May 19 to June 20. Floating Forest presents 1,000 floating slices of tree trunks, creating a beautiful forest on the still waters of the Grand Union Canal in front of The Portobello Dock that houses The Dock Kitchen restaurant and Tom Dixon’s shop on Ladbroke Grove, West London. Random in size, the suspended slices are displayed in a rigourous orthogonal grid that creates a colourful patterned covering. The garden makes the pacific waters come to life, evoking at once the calm beauty of the canal and the rich biodiversity of pond life. The garden references the storied history of the Québec forest and the century-old trade links between Québec and the United Kingdom. Many of the timbers in the 19th century industrial buildings of London, like the Victorian wharf building of The Dock Kitchen, are made from the enormous white pine trees that were felled along Québec river valleys, squared, floated and then shipped across the Atlantic to become the beams and floors that supported the shops and factories of the Industrial Revolution. These roundels (of red cedar) evoke the logs that were once seen floating behind booms at the mouth of every river in the province and the piles of logs still seen throughout Québec, awaiting their transformation into lumber for the construction industry and for export around the world. See the complete press release.