UNM Grad Student’s Design Selected for Chaumont Garden Festival

 

?EUR??,,????'??Forest Table?EUR??,,????'?? is designed by UNM grad student Tori Johnson, who send LASN an explanation of the design. ?EUR??,,????'??A windrow of Lombardy poplars suggest an agricultural vocabulary. The table represents the promise of feast, the sharing of abundance. A field of burned posts represents the forest that once existed, the burning of the fields and the left over harvest. Native grapes creep along the ground plane implying a trajectory of landscape recovery. The table is a slab of stabilized earth, the only soil in the design. It becomes a second landscape supporting a nursery o-f native oak seedlings that represent the forest that once stood and the forest that will be restored. The boxed trees, sequestered from the soil, suggest native restoration is also a cultural construction and a fabrication of a symbol of health and nature reminiscent of English romantic landscapes.?EUR??,,????'??

The U.K has its Chelsea Flower Show; the Japanese have the International Flower Expo Tokyo; New Zealand has the Ellestie International Flower & Garden Show; Melbourne also has an international garden show.

In France, it?EUR??,,????'???s the annual festival international des jardins, held at the park of the ch?????teau de Chaumont, a historic setting on the banks of the Loire, the ?EUR??,,????'??last wild river?EUR??,,????'?? in France, where Jacques Wirtz originally laid out 26 parcels of land surrounded by beech hedges.

The Chaumont castle was built on a rise overlooking the Loire in the 10th century, but Louis XI burned it to the ground in 1455 to put Pierre d?EUR??,,????'???Amboise in his place. Pierre?EUR??,,????'???s son had the castle rebuilt beginning in 1465. Twenty-six parcels of land on the property are used to build the gardens for the festival.

In the fall of 2007, the Studio 5 group at the University of New Mexico’s landscape architecture program worked on designs to enter into the 2008 Chaumont-sur-Loire Garden Festival competition in France.

The Chaumont Festival awards 11,000 Euros ($16,053) in construction money to allow the designers to build their gardens. The UNM program is raising funds to send Tori and a crew of four to Chaumont for 10 days in March to build the design.