This temporary garden was one of eleven “Ephemeral Gardens” created for Québec City’s year-long 400th anniversary festival. The project weaves together ideas from Québec’s regional long-lot system and Samuel de Champlain’s early agricultural experimentation and recordings to create a three-dimensional public landscape “cloth” that registers growth and change.
Conceived as a life-size graph, the garden’s length is an axis of time, embedded with a wood calendar that marks the duration of the festival in weekly increments. Rows of different vegetables and herbs run the length of the garden, each with a corresponding set of overhead, weighted ropes to mark life-cycle events.
Much like a gardener’s journal, observations are gathered in anticipation of improving next year’s garden. As the plants die and the fruits and vegetables harvest, traces of the lifesize calendar remain.
Status: Built
Location: Quebec, QC, CA
Firm Role: Architect | Landscape Architect
Additional Credits: Photography Credits: Jessica Craig/PLANT
