Festival | Previous Editions
Le jardin de bâtons bleus
This project, created for the inaugural edition of the International Garden Festival in 2000, returns this year as a permanent installation. Its inspiration stems from the famous Himalayan blue poppy that Elsie Reford introduced to the gardens as well as the mixed border of the Long Walk that dates from the 1920s. This installation provides a sensory moment that reinterprets the colours and movement embodied in Elsie Reford’s original garden, injecting it with contemporary visual appeal.
Using the same grammar, the allée, the colour palette and the varying heights of perennials, Claude Cormier's Blue Stick Garden nonetheless uses a very different vocabulary. Instead of flowers, Cormier has employed stakes which have been painted blue and are planted in tight rows to achieve a monochrome effect. Although these blue sticks are radically different from Elsie Reford's walk, there are similarities. The colour is reminiscent of the Himalayan Blue Poppy, which has been successfully grown at the Gardens and is now its floral emblem. Everything in Claude Cormier's garden follows the same attitude; referential but also transcended by his imagination. To visit Cormier's garden is a unique sensory experience, one in which the visitor experiences the allée, the maze, the dead-end and the U-turn. The varying height of each stick in turn modifies the perception of the garden and its environment as one walks through it.
Architect: Claude Cormier, architecture de paysage + Design urbain
Years of exhibition: 2000, 2009
