News

The International Garden Festival Celebrates its 25th Anniversary

2024-05-23

Anniversary Program Unveiled – The International Garden Festival will present its 25th edition from June 22 to October 6, 2024, on the theme The Ecology of Possibility. For this milestone year, the Festival has several surprises in store for visitors on the opening weekend on June 22 and 23. 

Les Journées de réflexion – Ouvrir les possibles [Discussion Days – Unfolding Possibilities]
The 25th edition will kick off with the entertaining and thought-provoking Discussion Days. The first conference-type event organized by the Festival since 2001, Discussion Days will take place over the Fête Nationale / Saint-Jean-Baptiste holiday weekend in Grand-Métis. This interdisciplinary event will bring together professionals, experts, students, the 2024 designers, and members of the general public. More than just a series of lectures, Discussion Days are ultimately about creating a safe space to share ideas and challenge preconceptions about the build environment, the cultural landscape and biodiversity. The keynote will be given by Chantal Colleu-Dumond, executive and artistic director of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire and its Festival International des Jardins. Consult the Discussion Days program here.

Special Onsite Project
Pergola
Jérôme Lapierre Architecte

The International Garden Festival asked Jérôme Lapierre Architecte to design a small pavilion to mark its main entrance. Pergola, which will be inaugurated on June 22, offers a contemporary reimagining of the small garden structure traditionally used to provide shade and support for climbing plants. Made of thin walls of interwoven red oak slats, Pergola seeks to celebrate and showcase the play of light and shadow in the surrounding gardens, creating a filter that reveals the true beauty of the site.

Special Onsite Project
Bruissement d’ailes
Festival International des Jardins of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire
(Bernard Chapuis, landscape architect, and Georges Vafias, architect and scenographer)

The culmination of a bilateral agreement between France and Québec, the Bruissement d’ailes garden highlights the need to get back to basics, to be as close as possible to our natural environment. Climate change and the destruction of natural habitats—these are the new conditions that the world’s temperate zones are now facing. Fragility, imbalance and uncertainty are now the order of the day, requiring each and every one of us to adapt to a changing climate by doing everything possible to temper the harmful effects of rising temperatures, by rethinking our behaviour, by battling heat islands, and by using new or traditional ways to address the problem of water and shade scarcity.

New Gardens—International Call for Proposals
This year, Artistic Director Ève De Garie-Lamanque invited designers to imagine the future of the garden. Four projects were selected amongst the 216 submitted (from 30 countries): Couleur Nature (Vanderveken, Architecture + Paysage | Saint-Lambert, Québec, Canada); FUTURE DRIFTS (Julia Lines Wilson | United States); Rue Liereman / Organ Man Street (Pioniersplanters | Belgium); and Superstrata (mat-on | Italy).

Extramural Project
FolkFlore
33rd Festival International des Jardins of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire (France)

Inaugurated on May 3, this carte verte, presented by the International Garden Festival at its counterpart festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire on the occasion of our 25th anniversary, was designed by LNpaysage (Luu-Thuy Nguyen, landscape architect) and Champ Libre, studio créatif (Émilie Tanguay-Pelchat, landscape architect and scenographer), in collaboration with Ève De Garie-Lamanque (curator) and Yvette Michelin (sash weaver). FolkFlore, which evokes both the boreal forest and the art of finger weaving, will be on exhibit until November 3. 

Visual Identity | The Ecology of Possibility
The visual identity for the 25th edition of the International Garden Festival was designed by the talented team from the Montreal graphic designers Principal. For as long as they have been working with us, their work for the Festival (posters, typography and campaigns) has garnered international acclaim, including a TDC Certificate of Typographic Excellence (project: ADAPTATION, 23rd edition of the Festival) and a 2022 Scarlet Letter Award for Design Studio of the Year (Advertising & Design Club of Canada).

About the 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, more than 180 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 architects, landscape architects and designers from various disciplines. Over the years, the Festival has received numerous distinctions, including the prestigious 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. 

Our Partners
The International Garden Festival acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the RBC Foundation, Fondation Ariane Riou et Réal Plourde, National Trust Canada, Canada Summer Jobs, Emploi-Québec and the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec. 

Main partner of our anniversary program, Premier Tech sponsors the Discussion Days, as well as the FolkFlore and Bruissement d’ailes gardens. The Québec-France bilateral exchange project received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie, the Délégation générale du Québec à Paris and the Consulat général de France à Québec. The Festival also acknowledges the support of the MRC de La Mitis, La Maison Alcan and Mallette.