Sixty-five international designers created 22 garden installations at the 15th International Garden Festival, which opened this past weekend at the iconic Reford Gardens (aka les Jardins de Métis) in Quebec, Canada. Established in 2000, the event is one of the biggest garden festivals in the world. Located along the edge of the St. Lawrence River, the various installations are a playful reminder about the value of landscape architecture and nature in everyday living. — bustler.net

Well before American women could vote, these college-educated few rose to the pinnacle of their fields as garden designers, writers and photographers. Declaring American gardens to be distinct from those in Europe, they took as their mission the beautification of America, whose cities were polluted and whose residents were suffering from decades of grinding income disparity and rampant industrialism. [...]

“It really was landscape gardening as social activism.” — washingtonpost.com

As the ranks of the super-rich swell, pride in property has expanded from the house and its trappings to the grounds. Bulldozers are mounding hill and dale, while hydraulic lifts heave massive trees into place and landscape designers orchestrate the creation of a new wave of artful estates. [...]

Why marvel at the scenery of a Romantic plein-air painting, when one can commission one’s own version of the sublime? — nytimes.com

Rooftop farms have been established all over the world to enable growing food in dense urban areas. In Japan, a whole new kind of an urban rooftop farm was opened recently. Soradofarm is an urban agriculture project that uses the rooftops of train stations to accommodate urban gardens for waiting train passengers that want to use their transfer time to relax and train their gardening skills. — popupcity.net

A team consisting of Mecanoo, Michael van Gessel, DELVA Landscape Architects and Jojko Nawrocki Architekci has been selected to design the new Garden of the 21st Century with integrated exhibition pavilion at the Royal Łazienki Museum in Warsaw, Poland. [...]

Mecanoo will be planning the exhibition pavilion, while Michael van Gessel and DELVA Landscape Architects are in charge of the garden design. — bustler.net

"Vu'òn - The Garden" by Swiss firm Bureau A is a temporary installation for the Tadioto, a gallery/bar/cafe/event space that Duc Nguyen Qui — a Vietnamese American journalist, writer, and artist — created for the blossoming creative community in Hanoi, Vietnam. The Tadioto is located in a section of a former penicillin factory from the Soviet era. — bustler.net

The Horniman Museum and Gardens in London just reopened its 16.5 acre gardens to the public after a major £2.3M ($3.5M) redevelopment. [...]

The most prominent part of the redevelopment is the new Gardens Pavilion designed by London-based practice Walters & Cohen. The firm's partners, Michál Cohen and Cindy Walters, recently topped a shortlist of strong competitors to win the coveted AJ Woman Architect of the Year Award. — bustler.net

So who did Zumthor call upon to provide the garden, the green hortus at the centre of his conclusus? Piet Oudolf, of course, foremost exponent of the new perennials movement, a low-key Dutchman with the build of a rugby player who has practically cornered the market in high profile planting projects: the Lurie Garden at Chicago’s Millennium Park, New York’s Battery Park and the wildly popular High Line are among his best known works. — telegraph.co.uk

Peter Zumthor's first completed building in the UK opens this Friday, July 1: the 2011 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion. The concept for this year’s Pavilion is the hortus conclusus, a contemplative room, a garden within a garden. One enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise and traffic and the smells of London – an interior space within which to sit, to walk, to observe the flowers. — bustler.net

British practice NEX created a benchmark in integrated design at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show in London last week, working with Buro Happold and Chelsea Gold Medallist Marcus Barnett on the creation of a pavilion for The Times Eureka Garden, in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. — bustler.net

The Garden of 10,000 Bridges, created by Dutch urban and landscape design firm West 8 in partnership with DYJG Beijing, has recently opened to the public at the International Horticultural Exhibition in Xi'an, China. The garden will be open until October 22, 2011. — bustler.net