Randy Cohen, Anne Cormier, Howard Davies
Christopher Bradley-Hole
Bonita Bulaitis
Marco Antonini, Roberto Capecci, Raffaella Sini
Christopher Bruce Matthews, Taco Iwashima
Paul Cooper
Charlotte Gaudette, Emmanuelle Tittley
Marie-Claude Massicotte, Raquel Peñalosa (Gustavo Ramirez Nieto, Lise Rivest)

And while it is clearly referential, with its use of the ubiquitous components sold by the lumber industry, this strangely shaped object is still intriguing. Its irregular form follows the lines of the existing tall vegetation. It is long and relatively linear, extending into the site and inviting visitors to follow it. Especially since its enigmatic rising profile suggests a resolution at the end of the journey, a possible view into the distance, the chance of an opening onto another, possibly wild, space.

And visitors won't be disappointed, for this ramp does in fact lead to a lookout suspended in the landscape. Along the way there is a long bench to sit on and a huge structure with birdfeeders. Furthermore, circled by a railing, the deck clearly acts as an interface with the natural environment, a planned observation device.

As its name suggests, Garden Party also serves as a social playground. The deck opens onto a wide staircase, leading to a blue glass beach. Up against the deck's retaining wall and closed off by a fence with alternating bench and gardening sections, the space resembles a sandbox. And in a final nod to our easy-living everyday backyards, this outdoor living machine, delivered fully equipped, comes with a barbecue. As visitors walk up another ramp to exit the garden, their lasting impression will be that they have enjoyed an architectural stroll through the landscape.

The designers

Atelier Big City is architects Anne Cormier, Randy Cohen and Howard Davies, winners of numerous architectural awards and competitions in Quebec and the rest of Canada, including the Canada Council for the Arts Prix de Rome in 1998. Their practice, and especially their approach to the landscape, is closely tied to the Gaspé. In fact, two of the firm's major projects are located in the Gaspé: the Centre d'interprétation du bourg de Pabos, in Pabos Mills (1992-94) and the Parc de l'aventure basque en Amérique, in Trois-Pistoles (1995-96). They recently won the design competition for a new architectural identification for Place des Arts in Montréal.

Christopher Bradley-Hole; Royaume-Uni /United Kingdom Layers Layers can be read in different ways: expressing a series of superposed geological strata, modelled on the stratification of the elements in garden design (the soil, plants, deck, furniture, etc.), or referring to the interplay between the natural and man-made components in a landscape design. Basically horizontal, the garden unfolds as is a large rectangle, with an all-over gridded pattern based on the quest for pure proportions. The source of its plastic expressiveness lies in its depth: layers of different materials, stacked but slightly off-set, creating surface and depth effects, suggesting paths and indicating functions. The reference or datum layer, in wood, forms a path through the garden and at the same time literally frames all the other elements in the composition. This main layer is cut away to reveal an underlayer, also of wood, but of vibrant colour. This layer lies directly atop the bottom layer, the ground, which is either planted or covered with gravel. Other thicknesses rise above the datum layer, with benches and water inserted here and there in the grid. The projections, setbacks and shelves and the contrasting materials and colours are like geological features, encouraging visitors to move through the garden seeking unusual configurations, or conversely, variations or repetitive or symmetrical effects. As a vertical complement to the design, mass plantings are also inserted in the grid: grasses forming blocks that move and glitter with the wind and sun. The designer Initially trained as an architect, Christopher Bradley-Hole runs a garden and landscape design office in London. He produces gardens of all sizes both in the United Kingdom and overseas, always seeking pure spaces and mathematically harmonious proportions. He has won several design competitions, as well as many awards at the Chelsea Flower Show

In her search from a distance for a connection with the unfamiliar landscape of Métis, Bulaitis found two evocative starting points for her design work. The first was the migrating Canada geese that overwinter near her home, and the other was the image of the meteor crater in nearby Manicouagan, visible only from space. But visitors shouldn't look for a concrete manifestation of these elements or for any hidden message in her No Strings Attached garden, for Bulaitis is above all an intuitive artist.

This rectangular garden suggests a zigzag route for visitors between the main and secondary paths framing it. Both entrances are marked by a mass grass planting and a very erect group of poplars planted on a diagonal grid. The other dominant and equally contrasting elements of the composition are already apparent, as a vibrant curving stream of red hemerocallis runs alongside a white parallelepiped suspended above the strong line of a dark wood bench.

Close to this large white volume, the black gravel path that leads the visitor gives way to an offset square covered in white stone chips. The series of refreshingly jarring contrasts halts here, as the white box reveals itself to be wound unevenly with string-the varying densities of the wrapping act as a subtle screen, offering glimpses of the colours, textures and forms of the garden and landscape that surround it. Horizontal acrylic mirrors, mounted on slender steel rods allowing them to swing back and forth, frame the space with dashes of light. Visitors can sit on the bench and admire their changing effects, or stand and make an infinite variety of compositions of sky, trees and their own wondering faces.

The designer

A landscape designer for 18 years, Bonita Bulaitis is well-known to the British public as a host and guest on many television programs. She also teaches in her field as a tutor at a London design school. She is currently working on a public landscaping project in Hanover, Germany. Hers is an intuitive approach to landscape design-she believes in creating spaces that stimulate the senses to "enchant the heart and soul."

The paths leading to the site have been carefully blocked with large earthworks created from 70 m3 of soil excavated for the purpose. Being forced to navigate these rather intimidating barriers masking the garden generates an element of surprise and serves as a theatrical entrance-it unsettles visitors, who don't know what to expect next.

Once inside the garden, they experience an immediate visual, emotional and intellectual shock. The entire surface of this vast expanse is covered in inert sand, with no plant life whatsoever. Nothing, absolutely nothing, rises above it seeking air or light. Even more disconcerting is the sunken texture of the garden, giving it a disturbing plastic beauty: 49 perfectly sharp-edged, rectangular, absolutely identical and clearly anthropometric excavations dot the site. They are arranged without any apparent order, with the little space between them forming a path for visitors to discover. It inevitably brings to mind a necropolis where archaeologists have been hard at work.

Then it all becomes clear and more welcoming: the holes turn out to be small, manicured negative constructions, with delicate sunken rims. They are obviously skilfully proportioned to play with the light in a contrasting way as compared with the surrounding woods, reminding us that shadow, after all, is an essential component of any garden, as it is of any architecture. Moreover, in a reassuring paradox, the ground inside each excavation is richly carpeted with flowers. In the end, the arid, repetitive nature of the overall design is offset, on another scale, by the diversity of the micro-gardens brimming with life and colour, sheltered in the shadowy holes.

Finally, the Land-I group sheds interesting light on two main types of shadows in gardens: the first, visible ones, help define space and forms. The second type are hidden, but meaningful and inspiring for those who know where to seek them; they are the history of the site.

The designers

Land-I is a group of Roman architects and landscape designers, made up of Marco Antonini, Roberto Capecci and Raffaella Sini. In recent years, they have earned a reputation throughout Europe for their temporary creations for the Festival di Arte Topiaria 2001 in Lucca, Italy, the Temporare Garten 2001 event in Berlin, Germany, and the 2000 edition of the International Garden Festival in Chaumont-sur-Loire, France. They have joked that coming to Métis has allowed them to create a project unthinkable in Rome, where it is virtually impossible to dig anywhere without hitting an artifact from an ancient civilization and being forced to down tools to let the archaeologists take over.

Are we really here in Métis when we are here? And then again, where are we really when we are here? These are the questions asked by The You Are Here Garden, an expression of the designers' reflection on how tourists relate to the places they visit. And indeed, where are we exactly when we consider a place with our holidayers' open minds, nonetheless programmed by what we read in our guide books? For Christopher Bruce Matthews and Taco Iwashima, that typical dot on a tourist map stating "You are here" is representative of this abstract place visited by tourists.

The major modern-day attraction of Métis-sur-mer as a tourist venue, i.e. its cultural history as a summer resort, itself transported from a mythical Scotland, suggested another reference for their Festival garden. This is the classic "Wish you were here" postcards, symptomatic of tourists' sense of foreignness in the nonetheless hyper-civilized places where they buy such cards.

Playing on these two references, Matthews and Iwashima present a mise en scène of a patch of wild meadow cut from a nearby site and literally transplanted, to be replaced in its original location after the Festival. Visitors are initially greeted by a postcard box set before a monumental postcard-shaped entrance curtain with a photograph of the original site printed on it. They then pass through a forest of suspended tapes printed with "You are here," obscuring the view ahead, before chancing upon two non-sites set in this labyrinth.

The main destination of this amusing, unsettling groping through the abstract setting is a rectangular outdoor room where the patch of transplanted wild meadow is surrounded by a picket fence. Here, visitors will look much more closely at the foreign patch of meadow than they ever would have in its original site. Three Adirondack chairs invite them to meditate on the contemporary experience of sites and, particularly, landscapes. A fourth chair is hidden elsewhere in the garden, so that they can prolong their reflections in a sort of landscape isolation chamber.

The designers

Christopher Bruce Matthews is a landscape architect originally from Britain, and Taco Iwashima, a specialist in environmental graphics of Japanese nationality. They worked together for years in Japan for Tokyo Landscape Architects, and today are based in the United States. Singly or together, they have collaborated with architects Tadao Ando and Toyo Ito and produced a number of acclaimed temporary creations, including a garden of the natural elements for the first Chaumont-sur-Loire garden festival (France, 1992), a Zen dandelion garden for the Kyoto Art Fair (Japan, 1998) and a working scarecrow garden for the Tsumari Echigo Triennale (Niigita, Japan, 2000).

Paul Cooper; Royaume-Uni /United Kingdom The Eden Laboratory The garden created for the Festival by the thought-provoking garden designer Paul Cooper was inspired by a very old botany textbook. It is a veritable laboratory experimenting with plant growth, a machine to test and show visitors how plants respond to various adjustments in their natural growing conditions. The formal and functional space is divided into six islands devoted to different experiments. The ground is covered evenly with gravel. Two of the experimental zones are mirrored in control groups of plants allowed to grow naturally, offering points of comparison. Furthermore, mimicking the scientific universe and its methods, this test garden reproduces each experiment several times, most of them contained within a wire fence: the repetition is meant to guarantee the validity of the results and the isolation to protect the experiments from interference, while at the same time shrouding the installations with an unsettling air of secrecy. So what are these experiments and what shape do they take? Three squares with nine plant traps each are devoted to studying the combined phenomena of geotropism and phototropism (sensitivity to gravity versus sensitivity to light); the effects of coloured light filters on growth; and hydrotropism, i.e. plants' ability to sense and reach toward a source of water. Another installation, the most mechanical, features two rows of ten gallows-like contraptions designed to determine the effect of vertical traction on plant height. Finally, flanking this arrangement are two circular aedicules, a lightproof chamber and its opposite, a greenhouse, to show the impact of light deprivation. Where we might have expected him to reflect on the art of gardening and suggest how that art can be renewed, the irreverent Cooper has instead turned his creative talents to re-establishing a connection with the age-old scientific and commercial obsession with controlling the growth of plants, the raw material. After all, aren't garden artists also very preoccupied with controlling the environment and mastering nature? The designer A sculptor and university lecturer, Cooper turned to garden design in 1984. He has since earned numerous honours, including gold, silver and bronze medals from the Royal Horticultural Society and the Sword of Excellence at the Chelsea Flower Show. His commissions and appearances have also made him widely popular with BBC television and radio audiences. His work continues to make controversial critical statements: Cool and Sexy Garden, 1994; a garden made out of car parts for the Ford Motor Company, 1997; work with students to create a garden in the London Underground, 2001...

While it may look like some wacky childish foolery, this creation by Charlotte Gaudette and Emmanuelle Tittley is in fact the logical embodiment of their experience in designing gardens for children. This is of course a very poetic expression of the distillation of their wisdom-the two landscape architects have drawn on childhood memories, on images of gardens in children's literature and on the vision of their collaborator, New York artist Pia Massie, of how children relate to nature.

The result is a garden to be explored as a motor, sensory and entertaining experience, physically engaging, stimulating the senses and encouraging play and daring. A smooth stone path becomes a capricious series of stepping stones spaced enticingly farther and farther apart. Wheat is planted alongside fragrant nicotiana, exciting visitors' sense of smell and making them want to plunge their noses into the flowers, while the palpable coolness of the stone and glass marble stream bed irresistibly calls out to their sense of touch.

Catimini is also a garden of mystery that spurs the imagination. It is hidden, to create an element of surprise, and visitors enter it either through a copper tube structure that will reveal itself to be an arbour as climbing plants twine around it or through a thick curtain of Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass vertigo-inducing giant plants. Once inside the garden, there are still secrets to be discovered. Like the stream, for instance, that ends in a spiral where the water mysteriously disappears, and starts in a tumble of glass marbles behind which visitors can peek out through a shimmering bluish halo. And then there is another hiding place, made of plants, that awaits visitors near the exit, behind a labyrinth of willow branches. We won't spoil the surprise...

The designers

With their similar social, community and educational backgrounds, landscape architects Charlotte Gaudette and Emmanuelle Tittley have been collaborating for the past two years. Together, they have designed and produced a number of outdoor spaces for daycare centres and written a guide summarizing their expertise in this area. Writing the guide convinced them that their work has a place in the overall renewal of the art of gardening, and they found Métis a perfect theatre for trying out their ideas.

In the beginning was the clearing. Landscape architects Marie Claude Massicotte and Raquel Peñalosa saw it as a latent garden, a space containing a desire to create a garden, similar to the feeling they always have. They also saw it as the trace of occupation, a vacation memory, a waiting summer playground, a site ready for a new page in its story.

Along with their desire to vividly share their poetic vision of the site came the idea of translating its potential and its sense of permanent transformation into the present and into action. And so, A Garden Is Never Finished, an interactive, participatory garden project, was born. With the help of set designer and graphic artist Gustavo Ramirez Nieto and cartographer and graphic artist Lise Rivest, the designers set to work on strategies to encourage visitors to "touch the waiting soil; smell the aroma of freshly picked herbs; let their hands talk as they spread seeds; caress and feel the moss as they learn its textures; let themselves go, follow the movement and crouch down to plant, water and shape the garden."

Behind a group of trembling aspen that extends the wooded envelope of the site lies a screen of grasses: here the designers closed off the clearing and began the planting process. Inside the secret garden, a series of sub-spaces defined in a plastic (fracture, furrow) or graphic manner (rings of primary colours) give visitors a chance to share in the gardening experience. They are invited to kneel on small padded circles, each of which is a small individual stage turning visitors into actors in their own gardening show. A work station, the centrepiece of the composition, implicitly co-ordinates activities all summer long, offering visitors the tools they need to prepare the soil and plant, sow, water and harvest plants.

And to allow this participatory gardening idea inspired by Augusto Boal's action-theatre to take shape, the designers and their accomplices will anonymously join the gardening public, encouraging real visitors to let themselves go, to constantly reinvent this garden, which is intended to be contemporary in the sense that it is constantly evolving, anchored in the present and in action.

The designers

Landscape architect Marie Claude Massicotte is team leader with the Parks, Gardens and Green Spaces Department of the City of Montreal, with special responsibility for the Saint-Michel environmental complex (the former Miron quarry). Raquel Peñalosa is an independent landscape architect. After training at the Université de Montréal, she worked in California and France. She has been working as a consultant in Quebec since 1993, for the Parks, Gardens and Green Spaces Department of the City of Montreal, the Mosaiculture organization, and other clients.

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