This would normally be the time to start talking about the walks that we managed to squeeze into the short gaps between the various French lockdowns over the past few months – and we would have done so but for the opposition of circumstance.
Events, dear boy, events!
The Riviera Garden Festival – 3rd Edition
Actually, in this case, a plain singular would do, since it is a single event, the third edition of the French Riviera Garden Festival (Festival des Jardins de la Cote d’Azur), which imposed itself on our schedule.
The notes about our walks from the past winter, after all, have spent so much time on the shelf that they can wait a couple of weeks more.
The Festival, conversely, cannot, since it ends on 9 June, and while most participating cities are likely to keep their gardens open for weeks or possibly even months after that date, there is no guarantee that they actually will.
If you want to see all there is to see for the third edition of the French Riviera Garden Festival, you better get going soon. Which is definitely something that you should do, particularly if you already happen to be in the area.
For one because it is great fun to see what people can do and what they try to convey using the simple vocabulary of plants, flower beds and pergolas (spoiler alert: this is not what Capability Brown had in mind), but for another because visits to the Festival sites also serve as good starting points for further explorations of the towns that accommodate the competing miniature gardens.
This year, there are six rather than five host towns to visit, Monaco joining the quintet of established competitors (Grasse, Cannes, Antibes, Nice and Menton).
While the field of the competition may have changed, its format has stayed the same: the gardens are small in size (think of a slightly oversized living room) and “ephemeral”, as the officially programme so poetically explains – they will be razed at the end of the Festival, leaving nothing behind but memories, images on discarded memory sticks and blog posts on Easy Hiker (here and here).
The miniature gardens are also “themed”, which means that they occupy a space somewhere in between a bed of forget-me-nots and an art installation.
All gardens are located near train stations and /or town centres, open 7/7 and free to visit. For more information and instructions of where to find the individual sites, go to the website of the event and the click on “Jardins en Competition”. (Yes, it’s French only but you will easily find the site maps.)
We suggest that you take your time and, rather than trying to see everything in a single day, split your visit into (at least) two stages.
This is what we did, too, concentrating our attention first on the eastern half of the field: Menton, Monaco and – our first stop – Nice which is the only competing city with three gardens (rather than standard contingent of two) in the competition.
The theme for this year’s festival is “The Artist’s Garden”, producing bold attempts to capture the essence of a single work (or of an entire artist’s oeuvre) in a single patch of greenery as well as painstakingly literal and allegorical interpretations.
Andrea Russo and Vincenzo Nardi (from Italy) chose the latter route, aiming to recreate the rural escape where the ten protagonists of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone assembled every night to divert each other with bawdy tales.
Every element of the ensemble (“Where The Plants Tell the Tales”) represents a feature of the garden in the Decamerone’s Tuscan villa – down to the copper spirals that are meant to stand for the “flow of words”.
The Bloc Paysage design atelier chose the opposite approach in their creation of “The Orientalist’s Garden”. The lush tropical flora and dense vegetation are meant to evoke the jungles of Henri Rousseau, the patron saint of all “outsider artists” …
… and have been arranged alongside a central axis that connects a painter’s atelier with a (stylized) water spring.
For their “Labyrinth of Muses”, Daniela Donisi and her associates from Savona (Italy) took a more abstract approach, choosing to illustrate the artistic process as such, i.e. the searching stroll through a confusing maze of visual and sensual impressions. You are encouraged to move along, your “head in the clouds” (the shards that are dangling from above), …
… while hoping for a chance encounter with one or several of the nine muses, antiquity’s patrons of all the various forms of artistic expression (representations of whom are scattered along the path).
Monaco has dedicated both of its two competition gardens to the visual arts: Christophe Gautrand’s “Free the Nanas” is an hommage to the vivacious palette and the voluminous women (the “nana” sculptures) in the work of the feminist artist Niki de Saint Phalle.
“From One Dream to Another” by the Hong-Kong-based designer Wu Wai Chung, meanwhile, recreates the world of René Magritte and Salvador Dali …
… in the one town on the coast where an image of pink doors on a barren beach is unlikely to remain the most surreal thing you are going to see all day.
(Neither, in fact, is the installation of giant chess pieces – take a close look in the mirror – which will remain in the Casino Square until 14 June.)
Menton, the easternmost of the competing cities, has looked further east in search of inspiration: Aurélien Davroux and Michel Lopez have dedicated their garden (“Artistic Cross-Breeding”) to the community of Russian artists which has enriched the Riviera’s cultural landscape for 150 years, from Chekhov and Tchaikovsky to modernists like Marc Chagall.
The hut at the back of the garden …
… is furnished with reminders of their works, while the trunks and suitcases in front are symbols for the larger wave of migration of which these famous names were only the crest.
Johanna Bonella and Abel Flosi invite the visitors for a “Rendezvous” in the artist’s atelier, where works in various states of progress are displayed alongside objets d’art and plants as well as different types of tools, both of the artistic and the gardening variety.
This makes for a very picturesque and entertaining mix. Just wander around: there is a lot to discover!
The star attraction of the Menton site, however, is “There Is Another Sky”, created by the municipality’s own landscaping department, which – like Emily Dickinson’s poem of the same name – tries to find a language capable of bridging the worlds of the real and of the imagination.
This garden is only one in a number of gardens in the Riviera Garden Festival that are – for various reasons – not part of the competition. There is one garden like that in each of the six competing cities and one in each of the three featured guest towns of Mandelieu, St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and Cap d’Ail. These non-competing entries deliver some of the most interesting visual experiences in this year’s Festival.
Another one of these outstanding works is the sculptural “Artist’s Garden” in Nice which picks up an original design by the Basque artist Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002).
