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.
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.
For its 26th edition, the International Garden Festival invites designers from all horizons to rethink the notion of borders in today’s post-colonial context, and to transpose their reflections into a garden-environment that blurs disciplines, renegotiates preconceived ideas about the garden/landscape, and actively dialogues with the visitor.
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.
Submission Guidelines
Designers are invited to design a garden that can take place in one or the other of the axes of the Festival. The artistic and technical committee of the 2025 International Garden Festival will identify, in collaboration with the designers, the site that will best showcase their project. 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.
