How do these gardens grow?

Tag : Balls Of Steel

Nearly 100,000 visitors arrive each summer for the festival and forElsie Reford's spectacular naturalistic gardens, created over threedecades and now a national historic site.
The garden of suspended silver balls is the work of threearchitects and a forestry engineer from Florence, Italy.
Soon, tendrils of morning glories planted in the largest of theballs will snake and bloom along the wires, underplanted with localferns.
The design, called Suspended Reflections, was chosen by a jury ofarchitects and landscape designers as one of four new gardens outof 50 submissions, being shown until the festival closes on Oct. 5.
This showcase is part of a new movement in landscape architecturethat focuses on gardens as art rather than as places of escape intonature.
In England, the centre of creative gardening, the approach has beencalled horticultural intervention art. It's in evidence even in thegarden world's most eminent venue, the Chelsea Flower Show.
"The gardens we show are an example of a trend toward minimalistarchitecture - straight lines and simple space," says directorAlexander Reford, Elsie's great-grandson, who launched the festivaleight years ago. "It's a bit of an invasion of architecture intothe landscape."
This festival flouts garden tradition. Visitors don't go to seepoppies, peonies, gentian, azaleas, roses and rhododendrons, theflowers so carefully planted by Elsie Reford just a few hundredmetres away.
Instead, they participate in gardens with reimagined form andfunction, where man-made objects provoke interaction with theiradmirers.
That was the goal of a team of young architects who met as studentsat the Université de Montréal. Their water garden is made of 66sprinklers on a gravel bed programmed to perform a choreographeddance with recycled water. Visitors are invited to run through thespray as they did when they were children.
"We were thinking how gardens emerge into the landscape," saysarchitect Sami Tannoury. "We used water and typical gardeningmaterials with the effect of bringing us back into our childhood."
Festival-goers can also plant their own forest in a giantplayground with "trees" - 100 oversized bright green cut-outs ofthe iconic pine-tree air fresheners that dangle from car windows -that can be moved at will. It's the work of Montreal-based AtelierRita.
At the Pomme de Parterre garden, a crowd favourite at last year'sfestival, potatoes are wired for sound and light. More than 1,000heirloom potatoes beep and squawk in their below-ground house.