Out of more than 300 applications from around the world, examined by a jury of around twenty professionals chaired by the writer Jean Echenoz, twenty-five have been selected and are presented to the public until November 4, 2018.
"From all eternity, the garden had a connection with thought," noted Chantal Colleu-Dumond, the Director of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire during the inauguration of the 27th edition of the International Garden Festival.
The original creations take visitors on amazing journeys referring to the universes of famous authors, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Octave Mirbeau, Marcel Proust or the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges.
The thirty creations present many bridges between the composition of a garden and that of a novel as mentioned in his inaugural speech, the writer Jean Echenoz, President of the Jury 2018, winner of the Goncourt Prize for "I I'm going "in 1999." To build a garden is to make a donation, the gift of an object which, like the book, will live its own life and which everyone can appropriate by inventing it himself. even in turn, "he said.
The gardens "also physically represent the paths of our thoughts", according to Chantal Colleu-Dumond. Like the creation of Youngjun Kim, a landscape architect from South Korea. Its garden entitled "The net of pansies" evokes exile in Korea from the XNUMXth - XNUMXth centuries. Fishing rods, heavily curved, express the desire for freedom and extend towards the outside world, represented by a net of thoughts symbolized by a creeping bugle in blue-purplish colors.
A vowels garden
"It is a great honor to have been chosen, a recognition. The identical reproduction of my creation is suddenly being prepared in a park in Seoul," Youngjun Kim told AFP.
"The possibility of an island" by the German architect Ulli Heckmann, in reference to the novel by Michel Houellebecq, poses the question: Is it possible that a tree grows in the middle of a surface of water?
The creation "Hortus Allergoricus" invites her to see, imagine, discover and meditate on the themes exposed in The Allegory of Plato's Cave. "It is the culmination of work with friends, architect, landscaper, cabinetmaker!", Explains Marion Hawecker, architect and featherweight.
More contemporary, the garden "Enter the Pensieve" of landscapers Bérengère Lecat and Stéphane Larcin is inspired by the literary and cinematographic saga of Harry Potter.
In addition to the selected gardens, the public can discover Green Cards in Chaumont-sur-Loire.
The French landscape architect and plastic artist Bernard Lassus thus created the space "Being there ... a little +", a synthesis between art, architecture (a lacquered sheet cut out by laser) and the environment (flower bed).
For its part, the association OULIPO (the work of Potential Literature) founded in 1960 by the poet Raymond Queneau and the chemical and mathematician engineer François Le Lionnais imagined "Le jardin des vowels" where the vowels are replaced by flowers.
Walkers are invited to dream, reflect and even participate, as in "The Sand Book", the name of a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, from the Moonwalklocal Collective which allows the most curious to take off their shoes.