The International Garden Festival is recognized as one of the most important events of its kind in North America and one of the leading annual garden festivals in the world. Since its inception in 2000, more than 180 contemporary gardens have been exhibited at Grand-Métis and as extra-mural projects in Canada and around the world. The 26th edition, titled Borders, rethinks the notion of border in today’s postcolonial context. The designer participants transpose these reflections into a garden environment that blurs disciplines, renegotiates preconceived ideas about garden/landscape, and actively dialogues with visitors.
The four gardens selected for the 2025 edition are:
BACK / GROUND by Patrick Bérubé | Québec, Canada
One of the great disasters of our times – aside from climate change – has been wrought in large part by the emergence of private property. The advent of domestication, then of agriculture, marked a major turning point in human history, following which people sought to control ecosystems and their cycles. BACK / GROUND triggers reconsideration of human activities and their environmental and social impacts. What emerges is a vision of the world in which nature is not simply a background but a living environment of which human beings are an integral part and from which they can dissociate themselves only through artifice or delusion.
Peek-a-Boo by Hermine Demaël, Stephen Zimmerer | Québec, Canada + United States
A border separates inside from outside, interior from exterior, self from other. When realized, that crudely drawn border occupies a thickened edge. What does it mean to spend time at the edge, to invest this liminal space? Architecture is defined through the articulation of walls and enclosures. Peek-a-boo flips one such border on its side to interrogate the edge between earth and sky, articulated as a colourful field of powder-coated steel grates. Four windows become trap doors which invite play, movement, and interaction. Between open and closed states, they suggest thirteen spatial configurations – a garden constantly in motion.
Scars of Conflict by Michael Hyttel Thorø | Denmark
Scars of Conflict is inspired by the physical devastation and psychological scars left by warfare. In the First World War, battles between warring nations left behind remarkable and nearly unrecognizable landscapes due to the intense artillery barrages. These landscapes reflect how borders—political, geographical, and cultural—can be violently reshaped by conflict, erasing our shared memories. Today, post-war sites serve a memorial purpose. They stand as symbols of resilience in the face of hardship.
You Shall (Not) Pass by Simon Barrette | Québec, Canada
In You Shall (Not) Pass, Simon Barrette challenges the limits, both visible and invisible, that map our environments, relationships, possessions, and thoughts. Composed of thousands of surveying markers strung onto steel wire – of the type used by surveyors to physically mark the edges of a property – the oversized bead curtain hangs in the middle of the forest. The monolithic installation cleaves the landscape, conjuring up the very archetype of a border.
