Everything is Garden——Between Sky and Earth

Location: Le Château de Chaumont-sur-loire, France

Client: Chaumont-sur-loire International Garden Festival Committee

Area: 235m2

Design: 2010-2011

Construction: 2011

Since 1992, the Château de Chaumont-sur-loire has been offering an International Garden Festival with different theme every year from April through October. The Festival area is about 3ha, including 26 gardens, each of them is about 250 m2. All the gardens are temporary, and will be demolished when the festival season is over to prepare for new gardens construction of next year. The aim of Festival is showing the newest design ideas and exploring the new direction of future garden. Due to the host’s encouraging pioneer thinking and experimental designs, the Chaumont-Sur-Loire Garden Festival becomes a stage to experiment on new creativity, new technique and new materials. At the same time, the rethinking on art, ecology and garden history also leads the development of landscape architecture.

The 2011 Garden Festival theme is “Gardens of the future or the art of happy biodiversity”. Atelier DYJG is invited to design one garden. It is the first time that Chinese team appears in the 20 years’ history of Chaumont Garden Festival. Our parcel is No. 15, and the construction budget is 10,000€.

For the exhibition theme of this year, we envision everything between the sky and the ground will be garden in the future. We create the “sky and clouds” by blue and white cloth strips, and the “ground, farmland and field” by sands, crops and vernacular flowers. Three boxes wrapped with red cloth symbolize our houses and provide us resting places. A pond represents lakes on the earth, mirroring the sky and clouds. Between the sky and the ground is the home of all creatures and gardens of human beings. In this small space, people can feel the sunshine, swaying cloths strips, jingle bells and misty poetic.