It’s springtime on the Riviera! For some, this is the cue to bring out the beach wear and to rummage through the garage in search for the waterskiing equipment.
For us, this is the time to get out our walking shoes – and, every other year, to start our tour around the six host cities of the French Riviera Garden Festival.
The format of the biennial Festival des Jardins de la Cote d’Azur 2023 is basically the same as that of the first three editions: themed gardens, outdoor art installations rather than anything like the patch of green in the back of your home, are displayed for a few weeks in the public parks of the French Riviera’s largest towns where they can be visited for free by the general public.
For the French Riviera Garden Festival 2023, the gardens compete for a total of seven prizes, awarded by three juries which respectively feature local celebrities and politicians (the “Official Jury”), journalists and landscaping designers.
What awaits you at the French Riviera Garden Festival 2023
The leitmotif of this year’s event was “Surprising Perspectives” – and as if the organizing committee had managed to tempt fate, the French Riviera Garden Festival 2023 turned out to have quite a few surprises up its floral sleeve, different ones from those than the organizers would have anticipated.
First there was the gardening-show equivalent of two women turning up in the same dress for a party, and then came the “car crash” of one of the exhibits.
In the meantime, another surprise was in store for the festival visitors who had turned up at the Jardin de la Pinède in Juan-les-Pins, the list of venues from the official brochure in hand.
What they did not know was that, after the brochure had gone into print, there had been an eleventh-hour switch to a new venue, the Park Exflora …
…. further to the west of Antibes’s beach suburb.
Admittedly, the new venue provides more space for the exhibits than its rather crowded predecessor, and it has all the charms of a thoughtfully designed, modern and spacious public garden …
… but it is also a good 30 minutes on foot away from Juan-les-Pins train station. (If you know your way around a little, however, you can also take a bus – Palm Bus line no. 8 – which will take you to the station Antibes Les Pins from where the venue is only a short stroll away.)
And as if to celebrate its arrival on the Festival scene, the Park Exflora provided the stage for another first in the history of the festival: a proper car-crash of a garden.
A photo, apparently taken when the exhibit called “Ciel” was being put into place, has been attached to the iron railings that now surround it.
All that is missing is a tape saying “Crime Scene – Do not Cross”. Or perhaps the “Ciel” has come crashing down?
At any rate, this is how the “Sky”exhibit looks today.
It is a sad sight, and you cannot help but feel sorry for everybody who has dedicated time and passion to the project. (Maybe the sudden change of venue is somehow to blame?)
There are two more offerings on show in Antibes that manage to lighten the mood somewhat: Ren & Sens, a reflection on the regenerative powers of the Mediterranean’s fragile eco-system …
… and 45 Degrees, a game of frames, odd angles and visual dialogues between different colours and shapes.
There is a bus stop just opposite the entrance to the Park Exflora, also served by lines 620 and 621. This is the easiest way to get to Cannes, the next stop on our tour.
In the familiar surroundings of the Villa Rothschild, whose gardens are hosting the festival for the fourth time, we get to see our first of this year’s prize winners.
The “Coup de Coeur” of the Professional Jury – each of the three juries awards such a “prize from the heart” on top of its main prize – went to The Temple, which was created by the Chinese-Uruguayan partnership of Maggie Wu Wai Chung and Alejandro O’Neill.
The idea is that visitors, while strolling through the garden, find themselves forced to bow down underneath the red ribbons that are hanging from a centrally placed steel frame …
… which is meant to make them experience a physically more intimate encounter with the garden’s plants and flowers.
While the (unofficial) “sub-motto” for the show at Cannes this year appears to be A Rhapsody in Red, the similarity of the two other exhibits goes beyond the matching of colours.
These two gardens approach the theme of Surprising Perspectives in different ways: while Last Harvest recalls the vanished mountain vineyards of the Southern Alps (which fell victim to the phyloxxera epidemic of the late 19th century), …
… and Red Forest presents an abstract play on angles and perspectives, …
… they arrive at visually near-identical results. At first glance, they only appear to differ in the extent to which the wooden sticks have been painted: just the top for one, the full sticks for the other.
Odd coincidence or design? Seeing these closely matched exhibits stand side-by-side is surely the most baffling of this year’s Surprising Perspectives.
Our last stop for today is Grasse, where we come across another first in the history of the Festival: Ciel, la Mer! by Solène Ortili became the event’s first ever double champion, having won two trophies by claiming the Coup de Coeur prizes that were awarded by the Official and the Press Juries.
It may take you a while to understand what is going on here. Overhead, the blue strips of fabric flutter in the breeze, but look more closely and you will see that this movement is reflected in the mirror which has been placed on the garden’s far end.
In this mirror image, the movement of the blue strips suggests the roll of the waves in the middle of a Mediterranean landscape that is itself a reflection of the carefully arranged stones and small plants placed at the bottom of the mirror.
Clever, you may think, but in fact, it is also profound: the visual symphony of waves and wind and the sea embraces the viewer in a moment of sheer epiphany.
The main prize of the Official Jury, however, together with a cash award of €10,000, went to the neighbouring exhibit for which Nicholas Tomlan had arranged a sequence of flowerbeds and plants around a precisely drawn east-west axis that connects the points of the summer and winter solstices.
Through its title, “The Heraclian Way”, the garden then weaves this axis into the world of ancient mythology.
Or is this an allusion to the star constellation of Hercules, which is visible in European night skies during summer? Perhaps this has been left deliberately vague, leaving you to work it all out for yourself. Such little games, after all, have always been a part of the Garden Festival’s characteristic charm and appeal.
The third offering at Grasse, called The Long View, is a poetic invitation to retrace the route taken by a Protestant family in the 18th century from the south of France to the Cape Town colony in South Africa.
It contrasts the vivid colours of the Mediterranean life with the promise of a life without persecution for this religious minority, the dream of a better future that is represented by images inside the wooden cabin in the centre of the garden into which you can only peer through telescopes.
The exhibits of Grasse are on display in the gardens of the Museum Fragonard, as they have been for the Festival’s previous editions, but the buses from Cannes – line 620 – no longer enter the old town and have been rerouted to the train station.
You can walk to the museum from there in approx. 20 minutes, but the route goes steeply uphill for most of the way.
Shuttle buses take you to the old town every 20 minutes. You need to have some coins ready for the trip (the fare is € 1.50 p.p. one way), but the bigger problem is that this is a time-consuming twist to the visitors’ schedule which makes it more difficult than before to cover the three western host cities of the Festival in one day.
But here is a promise: we will encounter no such logistic problems in the Festival’s eastern host cities where we will go next week to discover more Surprising Perspectives.
