International Garden Festival Opens 2027 Call

The International Garden Festival 2027 Call for Projects invites landscape architects, architects, artists, and multidisciplinary teams worldwide to imagine new relationships between people, territory, and representation. Selected proposals will become experimental gardens at Reford Gardens in Grand-Metis, Quebec, where the 28th edition of the festival is scheduled to open on June 19, 2027.

For more than two decades, the event has used temporary landscape installations to test ideas at full scale. The 2027 competition continues this approach by seeking four or five gardens capable of challenging familiar ways of reading geographic space while creating a direct and engaging experience for visitors.

Making Invisible Territories Legible

The theme, Making Visible: Alternative Geographies, concludes a three-year program developed by artistic director Eve De Garie-Lamanque. It follows Borders in 2025, which examined the representation and control of geographic space, and Mapping Sensitivity in 2026, which considered emotional, relational, and less tangible interpretations of territory.

The final chapter asks designers to reveal people, histories, relationships, and spatial conditions that conventional maps may overlook. Instead of treating geography as a neutral record, proposals can examine how landscapes are shaped by power, ownership, access, memory, identity, and cultural experience.

Intersectionality Meets Counter-Mapping

The brief draws particular attention to intersectionality and counter-mapping. Intersectionality offers a way to understand how overlapping identities and social conditions affect an individual’s experience of place. Counter-mapping, meanwhile, can expose alternative knowledge and territorial narratives that are often absent from official maps.

These ideas provide a conceptual framework rather than a fixed visual language. A garden might reveal overlooked movement patterns, question established boundaries, amplify underrepresented communities, or translate an invisible social condition into a physical encounter. The strongest submissions are therefore likely to connect a clear critical position with an installation that remains accessible to a broad public.

Gardens Designed for More Than One Season

Applicants should propose a garden capable of remaining on display for at least two summer seasons. Designers do not need to select a specific plot during the submission stage, as the festival’s artistic and technical committees will later determine the most suitable location in collaboration with each selected team.

Material responsibility is also part of the design challenge. Every proposal should explain how its components could be repurposed, reused, or recycled after the installation period. This requirement encourages participants to think beyond a temporary visual statement and consider the complete life cycle of the garden, from fabrication and seasonal exposure to eventual disassembly.

An International Platform for Landscape Experimentation

The competition is open to Canadian and international landscape architects, architects, visual artists, and multidisciplinary teams. Collaborators may be based in the same place or in different countries, but each individual or team may submit only one proposal. Selected designers will receive a production budget together with artistic and technical guidance from the festival.

Located beside the historic Reford Gardens at the meeting point of the St. Lawrence and Mitis rivers, the festival offers an unusual setting where contemporary experimentation meets nearly a century of horticultural heritage. Since 2000, almost 200 gardens have been presented through the program, making it an established platform for testing new ideas in landscape architecture, art, and public space.

Applications for the International Garden Festival 2027 Call for Projects must be submitted online by October 27, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. EDT. The selected projects will be announced in February 2027 before opening to visitors in June, offering designers an opportunity to transform critical thinking about territory into an immersive landscape experience.