Another look at the 4th Riviera Garden Festival! After our visit of the three western host cities (Grasse, Cannes and Antibes), we go east today for the Festival’s second half.
Our first stop is Monaco for this the 4th Riviera Garden Festival, which gives us the opportunity of pointing out another change to the Festival’s format (following last week’s long list) which attentive readers – provided they have followed the biennial competition for the last six years – would have noticed already: this year, host cities were invited to field a maximum of three entries.
Monaco was the only one to stick with the old number of two, which is why this year, we have the rather odd number of 17 competing gardens. It stuck to its own traditions in other ways, too: above all its history of active support for the ecological movement, driven by the convictions of Prince Albert.
The garden called “Fire, the Surprising Gardener” encourages a new way of seeing the factors that determine the shape of the Mediterranean landscape – fire plays a role which is as important as the sun and the sea, clearing the land and creating space for new species to emerge.
The exhibit also represents a nod to the principality’s international credentials: it was created by a an intercontinental partnership of designers from Holland and South Africa.
Monaco’s traditional perspective, after all, has always been the look out to the sea – which is exactly what its other exhibit does: “La Jetee”, also displayed in the casino gardens, presents a wooden pontoon on a pebble beach and uses it as a backdrop for an interplay of memories and viewing angles.
The Jardin Albert I in Nice is the most garlanded venue this year: all of its three competition gardens won one of the seven prizes.
“Twistscape” uses simple means – curved rather than straight sticks to support a wooden frame – to illustrate a complex philosophical thought: that landscape is not so much a panorama as what is perceived in movement.
The garden created by Paola Sabbion and Gianluca Porcile won the Prize of the Press Jury.
How would a garden fit for the future look? This is the question that the French team of Louise Rué and Le Pack Paysagiste took head-on in “Perspectives of the Future”.
Their answer in short: plants that are hardy enough to withstand the occasional fire and that require no chemicals to survive placed in a semi-arid environment. Unsurprisingly, it won the Green Deal Prize for ecological sustainability.
“Enter Here” by Hélène Papin and Kim Cao leads visitors through lush subtropical plants into a “timeless spiral” …
… that intends to serve as a reminder of where we come from and challenges us to wonder who we are and where we want to go, specifically what living environment we want to create for ourselves. It won the Prize of the Professional Landscape Designers.
Finally, to the Jardin Biovès in Menton. The “Blue Tide Garden” …
… has been inspired by the hidden activities of the sea, specifically by the plankton’s chemical reaction to the movement of the waves that produces the green tint of certain surface waters.
When you stand in certain spots of the exhibit “It Hardly Matters to the Foragers”, the walls block your view, so you will form your opinions on what you see on the basis of an incomplete view.
The garden is an explicit invitation to silently question and then to discuss different perspectives in both meanings of the word, viewpoints as well as preconceived notions.
In their creation “Vertiginous Clefs of the Soil” (the original French title contains a wordplay that loses much of its luster in English), a partnership of Latin American landscapists invite visitors to their home country of French Guayana.
The tropical world of coastal South America is evoked here in an arrangement of Mediterranean plants within an environment of objects that creates movement as well as balance.
Menton fielded no prize-winning exhibits this year, but just like two years ago, it won the Easy Hiker’s “Coup de Coeur” – our own “Prize from the Heart” – with a non-competing entry designed by the municipal gardening unit.
“Time Is Just A Question of Perspectives” is a smart and visually attractive reflection on time that manages to link Einstein with Jean Cocteau, particularly through motives from the latter’s film La Belle et la Bête.
These non-competing gardens – most of the host cities have one or two of those, as do smaller Riviera towns that take no part in the competition – represent only one part of the Festival’s “fringe”.
Other supporting acts include one-day events and additional exhibits like the children’s’ gardens where kids are encouraged to contribute their own visions of en miniature “gardenscapes”.
For a full programme, download a free copy of the comprehensive brochure. It’s in French, but for an English translation, right click on the body of text and choose the option Translate. (In the translation’s list of host cities, Grasse and Menton appear as Fat and Chin, respectively. Google Translate is a wonderful tool but sometimes, it does show its limitations.)
Officially, the festival runs until 1 May, but if past experience is anything to go by, the exhibits in most host cities will remain on display far longer than that and deep into the summer.
As a general rule, the Festival is best seen as a pretext for travelling from town to town on the Riviera. You will want to visit these cities anyway, and going around with an agenda is much better than roaming aimlessly, since it gives your day-out a firm structure and a sense of serious purpose.
You may want to visit some or all of the venues, but whether or not you are going for the Full Monty – in two days, three days or more – you should take your time to see other things besides.
Always bear in mind: gardens are not the only surprising perspectives on this 4th Riviera Garden Festival
