Festival | Previous Editions
Le jardin de bâtons bleus à Hestercombe Gardens
Originally designed in 2000 for the inaugural year of the International Garden Festival, the Blue Stick Garden was presented as a major component of the centenary celebrations of Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Edwin Lutyens’s acclaimed Hestercombe Gardens in Taunton, Somerset, England in June 2004.
The Garden
Blue Stick Garden is an abstract reproduction of the traditional Victorian mixed border that Elsie Reford adopted throughout her estate. The colour blue is a referent to the Himalayan blue poppy that Reford introduced and adapted to the region. The poppy has been scanned and fractalized, the blue pixels becoming the blue sticks. The visitor enters the garden by traversing a field of blue sticks, not unlike the experience of entering a corridor or a field of corn, or even an imaginary pasture of giant blue poppies. The space becomes an allée towards the centre of the garden. And on leaving, the visitor discovers an entirely new aspect of the garden when the hidden faces of the sticks, painted bright orange, become evident.
Blue Stick Garden traces the evolution of our visual culture from the impressionistic brushstrokes of Jekyll’s age to the digital precision of our own era. For Jekyll, the ephemeral was evoked through a deliberate succession of plantings across the seasons while in Cormier’s garden it is experienced by impromptu movement across fixed space. The compression of this chromatic shift from a season to a moment condenses the essence of the English garden into a contemporary reading. Cormier pays homage to both Gertrude Jekyll and Elsie Reford, as well as to the Victorian landscape tradition and its enormous influence on gardens in Canada.
Architect: Claude Cormier, architecture de paysage + Design urbain
Years of exhibition: 2004
