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This week, we are bringing you more lush Mediterranean Dreams from the French Riviera Garden Festival: having visited the western section of the Festival des Jardins de la Cote d’Azur  last week, today we present the remaining six gardens in Nice and Menton as well as all the other news from the festival.

"welcome to the realisation of your lush mediterranean dreams in Nice"

Flamboyant theatrical effects, the arts and the environment: the three exhibits in the Jardin Albert 1er near the Old Town of Nice reflect all the main themes and motives of this year‘s festival.

“Above the Immortal Plants“ created by the collective MaGy is a play on many opposites: nature and city, an idyllic garden and the Mediterranean semi-desert known as the garrigue, the vertical plane of the garden and the horizontal of the straw that separates landscaped perfection from the surrounding scrublands, a nostalgic dream of childhood and the harsh reality of the here and now.

"another realisation of your lush mediterranean dreams in Nice"

The key element in the installation is the swing, which is meant to lend an air of enchantment and wistful memory to the oasis at the centre of the piece but which is also designed to be actually, physically used by the visitors.

You are – according to the catalogue of the exhibition – not only invited to walk but also to “fly over the immortal plants”. Go on then, give it a go – you know you want to.

The same combination of the conceptual and the visceral is at work in “The Little Prince”, Helene Daumas’s take on Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s fatal last flight.

On display is a model of the author’s and aviator’s plane which crashed into the sea during a wartime reconnaissance flight in 1944 …

"Antoine de Saint Exupery remembered in your lush mediterranean dreams"

… while further inside the tent, you walk into a recreation of an underwater space featuring jellyfish and dancing posidonia, as if the visitor was going to meet Antoine de Saint Exupéry at the bottom of the sea.

While the first two of the exhibits in Nice unfold their meanings gradually (you cannot see everything on display at once but have to experience the different features in time), Benjamin Illat’s “The Resilience of Summer” is more of a classical “tableau vivant” whose many elements …

… challenge the visitor to imagine a Mediterranean world of tomorrow, a world that includes remains from known domestic landscapes such as the red soil of the western Cote d’Azur as well as plants that are still unfamiliar on the northern shores of the Mediterranean but that are expected to migrate from the south.

First, however, we shall migrate to Menton, the easternmost stop on our tour around the five festival sites, whose perhaps most visually striking installation called “Menton, Land of Gardens”, a design by the city’s very own landscaping department, …

"Menton Land of Gardens, realisation of your lush mediterranean dreams"

… is not part of the competition. (A smaller replica is on display at Nice Airport T2 for the duration of the Festival.)

Its theme of voyage and discovery, however, is picked up by two of the towns’s competition entries. First, there is “Travelling Seeds” by the LIEUX 10 landscaping studio, …

… which recreates the historic period of expeditions and explorations when scientists brought crates and trunks of rare seeds from faraway lands to the great cities of the central Mediterranean – together with a lot of junk, by the looks of it.

And “Terra Media-Acqua” by Marie Perra and Megane Millet-Lacombe features miniaturized archetypes of the three types of islands with the sort of surface that any Mediterranean sea voyager will encounter: volcanic lava, sand and fertile topsoil.

These three archetypes are connected by wooden planks – representing the voyage across the sea – that bear the names of the Mediterranean’s 162 islands. 

Finally, “Immersion” by the Multifolium collective of landscaping artists has been designed to evoke a walk on the Mediterranean seabed – a reminder that too little attention is generally paid to the invisible underwater landscapes that constitute by far the area’s largest ecological biotope. No account of the Mediterranean would be complete without them.

"lush Mediterranean Dreams"

How to best view all your lush mediterranean dreams

No description of the Festival des Jardins, meanwhile, would be complete without a note about all the other items on its schedule of events. There are all in all more than 350 activities, ranging from the out-of-competition installations – Monaco has also contributed one which is on display on the terraces behind the Monte Carlo Casino – and week-end treasure hunts to guided tours through the region’s “permanent collection” of gardens, painting courses and much more.

Our personal prize for the most charming extracurricular activity goes to the flower-pot gardens (or orange crate gardens) that were created by classes of local school children. Some of the most original works can be seen in Menton.

For the full list of activities, see the official programme (there is a French and an English-language version). The programme also features maps of the five host towns with highlighted attractions, encouraging the visitor to peek beyond the exhibition itself.

We recommended to do exactly that last week. Both of this week’s exhibition sites, the Jardins Albert 1er in Nice and the Jardin Bioves in Menton, are well located for such further explorations.

From Menton train station, you can reach the exhibition in less than five minutes and, after that, both the town centre and the beach in another short walk.

The Jardins Albert 1er are located near Nice’s downtown Place Massena and provide a great opportunity of combining a visit to the exhibition with a walk around the Port and the Old Town or a stroll down the legendary Promenade des Anglais.

In other news from the festival, we already know who won the three prizes of the competition. You may remember that two years ago, the prizes for the festival’s first edition were only awarded at the end. This year, conversely, the votes of the juries were released on the Sunday after the opening ceremony.

The jury with representatives from the national and international press voted in favour of “Above the Immortal Plants“ which is on display at Nice (see above), while the jury of professional landscape designers went for “The Windows of Matisse” (on show in Cannes).

And who won the main prize, awarded by the festival’s Official Jury?

Drum roll please, before we announce this year’s winner, who is …

"lush Mediterranean Dreams"

… “From One Bank to the Other”, created by the Passion Jardin design collective for the garden in Juan-les-Pins. Congratulations!

Judge for yourself which of these realisations of your lush mediterranean dreams come closest to your lush Mediterranean dreams.

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