The 8^th edition of the International Garden Festival celebrates sound, one of the essential yet frequently overlooked senses in the garden experience. To be held from 23 June to 30 September 2007, this edition includes twelve outstanding contemporary gardens by designers from France, Germany, the United States, Québec and Ontario.

While sound is an important part of how we experience the garden, we often pay attention only to birdsong or rustling leaves. In ingenious new gardens, designers propose myriad ways sound may have an impact on visitors’ experience and heighten their awareness of the audible in the landscape. The result of collaborations between landscape architects, architects and sound artists, the gardens become musical instruments in themselves, include sound elements activated through the movement of the visitor, or are pure soundscapes.

Doug Moffat and Steve Bates from Québec, are proposing Soundfield, an open-ended listening experience in a buffer of Poplar trees.

In La boîte noire, Jasmin Corbeil & Stéphane Bertrand with Jean-Maxime Dufresne, from Québec, integrate the sounds of children’s voices and sprinkler systems into a playful and colourful environment that interrogates what a garden is.

Angela Iarocci, Claire Ironside and David Ross, from Ontario, have conceived Pomme de parterre, in which the lowly potato becomes generator of light and sound, creating a visual and sonorous environment.

In Cat’s Cradle, Catalyse Urbaine (Juliette Patterson and Michel Langlois) with Gerard Leckey, from Québec, propose a garden-sized wind harp, in which a lattice of piano strings, objects and plantings combine to transform the site into a musical instrument.

Six gardens created in 2006 are being revisited by the designers in 2007, offering visitors thoughtful and playful reinterpretations of the landscapes of the Gaspé region, and far-off lands.

Cédule 40 (Julien Boily, Étienne Boulanger, Sonia Boudreau, Noémie Payant-Hébert), from Québec, evokes vernacular rural, agricultural, and playground vocabularies in Terrain fertile, a whimsical interactive garden.

Atelier le balto (Véronique Faucheur, Marc Pouzol, Marc Vatinel) from Germany, in Bois de biais, reaffirms the force of vegetation alone to transform a space, and advocates the garden as a place of movement and evolution.

In Core Sample by North Design Office (Peter North and Alissa North) from Ontario, a grid of fabricated core samples distils a geological metaphor into transparent columns that celebrate notions of collection, sampling, exploration, and discovery.

Playing with the phonetics of the translation for “greenhouse effect” (“effet de serre, effets desserts, les faits de cerfs, et fait des serres, effet des serres …”) Bosses design (Éric Daoust, Donald Potvin, Jean-François Potvin) from Québec, take the ubiquitous greenhouse as the starting point for their garden, L’effet désert.

In Safe Zone, by Stoss Landscape Urbanism (Chris Reed and Chris Muskopf) from the United States, an array of commercial products designed for potentially dangerous situations are turned to whimsical uses.

Le jardin des Hespérides by Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot, from the United States and France, draws on the sounds, scents, and materials of Vietnam, Cao’s country of origin, while in its own way evoking the riverine landscape of the St. Lawrence.

And finally, gardens by Hal Ingberg, from Québec, and Benjamin Aranda & Chris Lasch, from the United States, are being held over from previous editions.

Clic here for a description of each of the gardens.

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