Dead Garden II is an arrangement of logs built for the International Garden Festival, an event held annually in Metis, Quebec (Canada), that sponsors new possibilities, wild ideas and other horizons for the practice of landscape design and fleeting architecture.

Like Dead Garden I, DG II suggests an active corridor of dead trees, and takes advantage of the process of becoming common to every garden. Drawn as a horizontal flow, the project is a vegetable nursery enveloped by a net that dampens the light and creates a shaded environment for the trunks, catalysing not only the movement of visitors throughout its corridors but also the growth of mosses and lichens on dead matter. The cedar trees were found within the forest on the Festival grounds; the garden acting as a greenhouse where the logs will be gradually taken over by new mosses.

In its 14th edition, the latest version of the International Garden Festival presented six new projects selected by an international competition that received 290 proposals from 23 countries. With annual visitation of 200,000 visitors, the exhibition is on display during the Canadian summer.

An  excerpt from the project description:
“Trees die whereas new trees are born. Growth and becoming are tools of the landscape architect, but rarely the cycle of life and death is employed as substance of garden design. Dead Garden proposes a garden made of dead trees. (…) It takes advantage of an inexorable phenomenon: every life is a foretold failure, every plant will perish, and every organic matter one day will be of somebody else’s use.”
Photos: Louise Tanguay, Martin Bond