Two years ago, the French Riviera Garden Festival premiered to considerable national and international acclaim.
Over five weeks in the spring, 500,000 visitors attended the 5 exhibition sites, and a press corps of 150 journalists from more than 30 countries generated content (nearly 250 articles and radio / TV programmes) with an “advertising value of more than €2 million“ (the host organizers’ calculation, not mine).
The festival was also credited with a significant contribution to a 15% increase in the year-on-year number of tourists for the month of April. It became clear fairly soon that a repeat was on the cards.
Last week, the second edition of the French Riviera Garden Festival (Festival des Jardins de la Côte d’Azur) was launched in five freely accessible public gardens along the coast of the French Riviera (in Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Grasse and Menton).
Until 28 April, the public will be invited to visit 15 temporary miniature landscapes (each with a maximum surface of 200 square meters) in which professional garden designers have illustrated their personal vision of “Mediterranean Dreams”, the official motto of this year’s festival.
Three prizes are on offer: one awarded by the official jury (presided by Marina Picasso, one of the artist’s grand-daughters), one by a jury of garden architects and one by representatives from the national and international press.
For the foreign visitor, this exhibition represents a great inducement for further explorations of the main cities along the French Riviera. You could, if pressed, see all exhibits in one day, rushing from town to town by public transport, but we recommend to combine your visits of the sites with brief trips to the towns themselves, allocating (at least) a total of two days.
Which is what we are going to do for the purposes of our blog (for technical details, see the bottom of today’s post), going from west to east and starting at the Jardins Fragonard in the town centre of Grasse which serves as a good starting point for the uninitiated.
What to expect from the 2nd French Riviera Garden Festival
What can you expect to see? If you were there for the 2017 show, you will be familiar with the festival’s general style and flavour, but if you are new to the festival, a word of warning. It is obviously impossible to do a Capability Brown on a scale of 15 x 15 meters.
More to the point, however, the English style of gardening, keeping nature on a long leash, has never really caught on in France: French gardening has always been about imposing alien concepts on nature, order and geometric rigidity in the 18th century, a playful-occasionally-veering-into-the-campy concept of culture in the 21st.
It is one thing – as Agnes Emonet and Olivier Pelloux have done in their take on Homer’s “Odyssey” called “Going with the flow” – to deck out a representation of the Mediterranean Sea as a pile of sparkling blue stones …
… but another thing entirely to add details such as small fish.
Conceptual art or conceptual kitsch? That is for the visitor to decide. The festival appears to suggest that the line between the two lies very much in the eyes of the beholder.
The exhibits of Grasse also introduce you to two different ways of reacting to the challenge of landscaping on a small scale. “Going with the flow” clearly encourages visitors to step in, to walk through and to collect personal experiences like seashells on a Mediterranean beach.
Solene Ortoli’s “Impressions of a Dream”, conversely, treats landscape more as a view, as something to look at from a distance, like an exhibit on a museum wall: gardening as a continuation of modern sculpture by other means.
But it is also possible to combine these two approaches. “Herbaceous Contours of the Mediterranean” (presented by Livia Kolb and Robin Chouleur) represents a map of the region, made of seashells (the sea) and straw (the land).
But it is only when you take a close inspection of the installation that you recognize essential details – such as Italy’s distinctive shape, for example.
The same contrast of approaches can also be observed in Cannes.
While Floriana Marty’s “Flying Garden” looks best from a distance …
… Ludivine Baruton’s “Ode to Oriental Women” – very much in tune with its subject matter – does not show much from the outside: just enough to make you curious.
The same is true for Thibaut Jeandel’s “The Windows of Matisse” which invites you to wander around the installation …
… finding different angles …
… and colour combinations.
The exhibits of Antibes, the final leg on the western half of our tour, are displayed in the beach resort of Juan-les-Pins.
Where Cannes had a “Matisse”, Antibes has a “Picasso” in the shape of Alejandro O’Neill’s “A Mediterranean Painting”, a joyous mix of geometric patterns and organic matter.
There is also Giorgio Broccardo’s “Throw It to the Wind”, a homage to the elements that have shaped the region: the land, the water, the wind …
… and “From One Bank to the Other” (created by the Passion Jardin design collective), the garden that, more than any other, encourages the visitors simply to walk in and – through its richness in detail – to linger.
It also manages to express the conceptual – two banks of the Mediterranean, the north and the south – not only in the terms of an architectural fusion of European and North African elements …
… but also in the language of nature.
Finally, as promised, some technical details of the French Riviera Garden Festival 2019.
All five cities have dedicated stops on the regional train network (even the resort of Juan-les-Pins), but the Jardins Fragonard in the town centre of Grasse are a long uphill walk away from the train station.
This is why it is best to take bus no. 600 from Cannes (the train station forecourt) all the way to the central coach station in the town centre of Grasse, from where you can reach the exhibition site in a 5-minute walk.
The gardens of Cannes are on display in the gardens of the Villa Rothschild, a good 20-minute walk away from the station.
Unless you are in the mood for the ugliest walk of your stay (perhaps your entire life), avoid the most direct route (down the Avenue des Anciens Combattants) in favour of the detour via the Rue des Serbes and a right turn into the beach promenade (the famous Croisette).
Take a left turn on the quai of the yacht harbour before continuing along the beach and turning right into the Chemin de la Nadine, which will take you straight to the Villa Rothschild.
In Juan-les-Pins, walk straight out of the train station into Avenue Dr Fabre and continue across the main road before making a right and a left turn in quick succession to reach the Jardin de la Pinede by the sea.
Unless you fancy walks around out-of-season beach resorts – Juan-les-Pins only springs to life in the summer – you should preserve any energy that you may still have left for the short trip to Antibes where you can round off your day by exploring the small but attractive Old Town.
See you next week for more from the French Riviera Garden Festival in Nice and Menton!
