The International Garden Festival invites visitors to explore twenty-six interactive garden installations created by seventy-two landscape architects, architects, designers and visual artists from nine countries. For the 17th edition, five new creations by designers from Canada, the United States, France and Switzerland will join the temporary installations on view and a sixth will be exhibited at special events throughout the summer.

Five new gardens of the 2016 edition of the Festival were selected by the jury from 203 projects submitted from 31 countries for the annual competition. LE CAVEAU is a complex construction made of stone gabions that support a levitating green platform. CYCLOPS is gargantuan cone 8 meters in diameter suspended over the forest floor.

The MAISON DE JACQUES provides a happy home to a forest of beans where children can play hide-and-seek in one of many secret gardens. In TiiLT, 24 tents populate a space like a school of fish or a flock of birds. CARBONE offers a charred tree trunk, capturing carbon during its entire life and contributing to the renaissance of the forest.

These new installations create new experiences and environments to add to those of past editions. Visitors can explore the environment and experience the joy of moving mature trees along a hidden rail in I LIKE TO MOVE IT or admire the movement created by the wind from within the black and white bands of LINE GARDEN. The pure white walls of COURTESY OF NATURE reveal the hidden artistic genius of nature while SE MOUILLER (LA BELLE ÉCHAPPÉE) invites visitors to don a pair of colorful rubber boots to muck it up for themselves among the floating aquatic plants.

The whistling white ribbons in LE BON ARBRE AU BON ENDROIT link a forest of hydro poles to teach about planting the right tree in the right place and provide a welcome perch to a resident flock of turkey vultures who have adopted them for their morning outing. A sixth new garden, DRESS UP!, will be on view as a participatory event throughout the summer where visitors become the garden by donning one of colorful capes.

Special events include the annual fundraising dinner in aid of the Festival in the potage on August 5 and a series of events to launch Experimenting Landscapes Testing the Limits of the Garden, a new book by Emily Waugh on the Festival to be published by Birkhäuser in September.