Hybrids: Reshaping the Contemporary Garden in Metis

The International Garden Festival, held each year in Quebec’s historic Jardins de Métis, is an internationally known tourist and design destination. The reshaping of the modern garden — a hybrid that draws from art and architecture, urban and industrial design, pop culture, and new technologies — is the focus of the festival and its designers. Challenging commonly held assumptions about what a garden is or can be, this book features imaginative, temporary works from the provocative to the playful, created for the festival by architects, landscape architects, and visual artists from Europe, the United States, Australia, and Canada. With text by 22 festival designers, the book offers a portrait of contemporary thinking on the art of the garden, as well as humans’ relationship to, and impact on, the physical world. From the theoretical and historical to the intensely personal, the insightful text explores what makes a garden such a rich site for innovation and experimentation.