I’ve written several times before about the International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire but not since 2021 so I thought it was about time for an update after this year’s visit.
Chaumont is a wonderful combination of a Renaissance chateau, full of contemporary artworks, 19th century parkland full of contemporary sculptures and a wild and whacky collection of contemporary gardens. It usually manages to combine some witty ideas with great design and outstanding permanent planting.
This year the theme was the Garden and Cinema which was interpreted very differently by the 30 or so designers who created the festival gardens – some very clever, some strange and some very weird and “philosophical”in a very French way [that’s a polite way of saying I didn’t see the connection or get the point!]
Luckily I went just a couple of days before the horrendous heatwave that hit central France with temperatures of 40C+ so the gardens were still green. I hope enough survives to make another visit worthwhile this autumn.
The Director of the Festival wrote in her introduction: “Gardens are places of memories, seasonality, presentation and emotion. Both real and symbolic, they provide a stage for taming, tidying and cultivating nature – without ever entirely controlling it. For the great art of time, spectacle and storytelling that is cinema, gardens serve as a partner that delivers a level of aesthetics and poetics rarely found elsewhere” As “gardens have been used as film sets ever since cinema first began” this years show “encourages visitors to explore the formal, narrative and symbolic connections between these two arts.”
From my point of view there was just one problem: I haven’t seen any of the films that were referenced in the festival so I can only judge by the quality of the planted experience.
The photos are all mine unless otherwise acknowledged but to give to you a sense of French garden theory, which can be rather abstract I’ve added a link to the notes made by the designers…but be warned, they are not always an easy read!
The first new garden set the tone wonderfully. It’s approached down a long sloping path because the garden itself is set in shrubbery on the side of a bank. First impressions were pretty grim with what appeared to be plastic netting over a frame. Certainly nothing special, until that is you reach the entrance … 
…and find yourself in a small underground cinema hidden under thick trailing foliage. There’s a softly-lit director’s chair, a pool of water where the front of the stalls should be and a large screen showing a film of underwater life with strange creatures, weird colours and strange noises.
The whole effect was theatrical and [definitely difficult to photograph well] but it made me smile although sadly I don’t really have anywhere I could do a similar thing at home.
The designer’s notes on La lanterne des profondeur – the Lantern of the Deep
Next round was a garden inspired by the film Avatar and described by the designers as “a manifesto for a living planet, where culture and nature fuse to create a landscape inspired by the jungle and its protective coolness.” The garden uses ” art as a means of benefiting and fostering quality of life and the future of the living world.” For once the “theory” behind what they were trying to do made sense.
The whole garden was planned as a miniature environmental experiment about adapting to climate change. The central “lagoon” with its fish, aquatic plants, little stream and waterfall [steam machines are a regular feature at Chaumont], bamboo sunshades slowly being covered with climbers, and even the air plants were designed to create an “island of freshness, where vegetation and water join forces to modulate, purify and regenerate the atmosphere” and are supposed “to evoke Pandora, the planet featured in the film.”
The mechanics of the special effects of film-making were gently explored and parodied in another garden. Using mirrored backdrops a range of landscapes were planted in miniature – each merging into the next with differing perspectives possible depending on where you stand. It worked brilliantly and was one of my favourites this year, although again it’s not something feasible in a “real” garden at home.
Notes by the Canadian designers of Paysage-Montage or Landscape Composition
Another garden using the same idea of mirrored backdrops and small-scale planted landscapes in front but took a different approach. Here the emphasis was on the mirrors and the distorted reflections they created, and this was reinforced by large shallow basin of water in the centre of the space which reflected the sky.
The effect was bizarre, but as you walked around the designers hoped you’d see the garden unfolding “like a film, scene after scene, changing, fragmenting and reconstructing perception.” 
They likened the experience to being “in an entirely fabricated dream, where each space represents a level of consciousness” and say they were inspired by Christopher Nolan’s film Inception, [another one I hadn’t seen or even heard of!]
Notes for Les Racines du Reve – the Roots of a Dream
Equally witty, was this play on the words “Cannes Film Festival”. It’s entered by walking round a wall of rough wooden panels and finding a doorway with a red curtain. When pushed aside it reveals a red carpet rolled out along a catwalk over water and lined with a festival of Cannes [canne is also the French for walking stick], some of which have the heads of ducks or canards. Don’t miss the paparazzi cameras peering over top of the curtains… It couldn’t fail to raise a smile or a gasp of surprise
so perhaps its not surprising it won the award for design and innovation.
Notes on the Festival of Cannes
You don’t have to have seen the film to know the inspiration for the next garden…one dreamed up by two friends passionate about nature and dinosaurs.
The garden won the Prize for best planting but that’s not surprising because as the designers say: “In this garden, the real stars are the plants, which have survived since the days of the dinosaurs. Tree ferns form an enveloping canopy, effectively creating a cocoon in which time stands still. Primitively shaped cycads, gingko bilobas, horsetails… they’re all witnesses of history – proof that nature didn’t wait for the dinosaurs before conquering the Earth. This lush garden pays tribute to plants, the actors of the living world, presented here as celebrities on their verdant film set.”
Their notes on Jurassic Plants
To find six really clever, thought provoking or funny gardens in one year is quite unusual. Normally it’s only half that number which really engage my brain or appeal to my taste in planting. Some of the remaining. 24 were really dependent on having at least a clue about the film, so although sometimes the planting was interesting at others it was merely incidental to a piece of sculpture or an idea. Here are just a few pictures to show you what I mean. The link to the notes will tell you more if you’re intrigued or curious.
The designer of Drole de Fantascope [ which translates roughly as a strange optical device] referred back to the earlier days of moving pictures, basing her garden round a her interpretations of a praxinoscope. “This little-known mechanism, invented in the 19th century by Émile Reynaud, enables a sequence of images to be viewed and creates the illusion of movement. A nod to the world of cinema and the art of animation. The earliest films lasted no more than 30 seconds…”
The device stood inside a larger version of itself with mirrors and cut out silhouettes of dancers inspired by the film Sweet Charity. Unfortunately the planting was dull and unimaginative and served as an unchallenging setting for even more metal silhouettes. It was also intended to “reconcile the world of choreography with the world of plant life, both of which are in constant motion.” Nice idea but…
Her notes can be found at Drole de Fantascope
There was much more interesting planting in a Persian-inspired garden designed a Franco-Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, although I didn’t see or read of any particular cinematic connection. Instead the Garden of Minab which means ‘between the waters’ – the river and the sea suggests an in-between space “where we can simply sit back without constantly being forced into extreme positions. Between lands, continents, peoples and languages, between beliefs and values, between ideologies and religions, between earth and sky, between water and fire, it is here, somewhere in this in-betweenness, that life happens.” The design is based on Zoroastrian culture, and the central pavilion is based on a Fire Temple, which are almost aways built next to water.
There was a nice take on rolling out the red carpet as the entry to Le Jardin Rouge-Baiser (Red Kiss) and the screen under the nice green roof “replays these scenes that cinema has forever etched into our imaginations. From station platforms to sunsets to kisses in the rain, the set is brought to life.” Unfortunately it didn’t do that for me – maybe sitting on a log in the full blast of sun didn’t help – oh for an ice cream in the back row of a darkened cinema!
Unfortunately some gardens just didn’t seem to work for me. La Petite Boutique des horreurs, [The Little Shop of Horrors] garden is an imaginary sequel to the 1960 film of the same name.
The accompanying notes say the garden “doesn’t profess to be a set, nor a reconstruction, but rather a fragment of the film itself, as if the story has overflowed and found a refuge here, in a space it has slowly shaped and moulded.” At the centre of the garden, carnivorous plant Audrey Junior imposes its presence and keeps a watch over this strange yet calm world. Life goes on regardless, in its slow, abandoned state, with an unexpected element of tenderness far removed from the horrors of the film.” I’m afraid you needed a vivid imagination to see what they were on about.
And what do you make of these?
This garden contained three giant kokedama (moss ball) planets which were spinning slowly, like stars in perpetual motion. Read more on the designer’s notes
For most of the rest of this year’s entires I suppose you can draw your own conclusions when I say I didn’t take many [if any] photographs, but if you want to check out the other gardens the festival website lists them all. with photos and explanatory notes
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