INTERNATIONAL GARDEN FESTIVAL SUCCESS

Anca Panait and Greg Meikle of Glasgow’s AHR Landscape team have been successful with their competition entry for the prestigious International Garden Festival  in Chaumont-sur-Loire, France, a festival that has been running for 25yrs. The theme for 2016 was ‘Gardens for the Coming Century’ and from over 300 original applicants, their garden is one of only 28 constructed and the only successful UK entry joining others from France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Russia, Canada, Korea and China.

Their winning entry, 'Frankenstein's Nature', invites the visitor on a journey dominated by science where experiments can and do go wrong. By making the analogy with Mary Shelley’s novel, ‘Frankenstein’, the design concentrates on contrasting processes highlighting the unpredictability and temporality of scientific actions and their potential results. Elements that are normally un-associated are paired together as a way of highlighting their intrinsic features and heightening visitor’s senses. Touch, smell and hearing are all present through different material associations.  

The project was self-constructed at the beginning of April prior to the official festival opening in early May within the grounds of Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire. The Chateau lies 125miles south of Paris overlooking the Loire Valley and has been providing a unique panoramic showcase of landscape design from all over the world since 1992. The festival, open to the public until the 1^st November, is a source of innovative ideas and a nursery for talent with the diversity and high quality projects contributing to the Festival’s international reputation.  As a result it has become an indisputable meeting place for the work of new generation landscape architects and designers.

The garden construction would not have been possible without the support from AHR, Neilson Partnership and Tobermore Paving who have played a vital role in helping develop and deliver this project.