BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

An American garden at the Domaine Chaumont-sur-Loire garden festival is a landscape of endless possibility.

FROM THE OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

When Phoebe Lickwar, ASLA,  and Matt Donham arrived in a small town in central France this past March, everyone knew who they were. The designers, principals at FORGE Landscape Architecture and RAFT Landscape Architecture, respectively, were one of some 24 teams (and the only Americans) competing in this year’s Domaine Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival. And as they walked around, Donham remembers, “every person was like, ‘Ohhhh, the Americans with the 400 trees.’ Even the guy who took our tickets in the chateau was like, ‘Oh, you’re the ones with the 400 trees.’”

The festival’s theme was “Garden of Thoughts,” and Lickwar’s and Donham’s concept, Dans les Bois or Into the Woods, was based loosely on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which presents a labyrinthine garden as a metaphor for time, choice, and infinite possibilities. Their plan called for two intersecting systems of walkways: the first, a circuitous and ultimately circular series of gravel paths, the second, a skewed grid of wooden gangways, each as narrow as a gymnast’s balance beam. Both would be obscured by a dense screen of vegetation, created by more than 400 trees.

Young whips were planted close together to create an instantaneous woodland experience. Image courtesy Eric Sander.

“We wanted to create this experience that we were reading within the story, of not moving on a straight path, making choices along the way,” Lickwar says.

“You can’t ever know where you are completely,” Donham adds.

“Or what the consequences are going to be,” Lickwar says.

“You make all these choices with partial information, which is kind of the experience of life,” Donham says.

And yet it was the number of trees that flabbergasted the festival’s organizers, especially given the garden’s size: a mere 1,750 square feet. Some tried to persuade the team to use fewer and larger trees. “But the entire idea hinged upon creating this density of plant material to create the effect of moving through a labyrinth,” Lickwar says.

More important than how many were the types of trees selected. Lickwar and Donham specified whips, specifically young specimens of cultivars such as hybrid poplar (Populus trichocarpa x P. deltoides), which are bred to grow quickly for uses such as biofuel. Their use was a reference to the passage of time. “The idea of trees that are kind of superpowered and [growing] faster than a person would think, there’s a shift in perspective that might come through that,” Donham says.

The team, which also included Hannah Moll, Associate ASLA; Andersen Woof; Daphne Edwards; Jenny Sasson, ASLA; Charles Myers; and Raafi Rivero, had five days to construct the garden (a timeline imposed by the team’s budget). Despite unforeseen challenges—a week of rain soaked the wooden beams, which then took days to properly char—the garden, which will be on view through November 4, 2018, was completed on time. It went on to receive the festival’s Prize for Creation, one of four awards given out.

For Lickwar, the experience aligns with her continued exploration of ecology, productivity, and culture. For Donham, it’s a reminder that minimalism can be whimsical. “This garden conforms to my notion of minimalism in all ways except it’s super fun, too. It’s not dead.”

Image courtesy Forge/Raft.

But the most memorable day for both designers remains the day the 400 trees arrived. Because they hadn’t been able to tag them, and also because of the fuss that was made early on, they were nervous the whips would be too bare, too spindly to create the desired effect. “We were kind of on pins and needles,” Lickwar says. When they arrived, however, the trees were “better than we had anticipated,” she says. “They were taller, they were more well-branched. The willows had these burgundy trunks, the sycamore maples were green. They were perfect.” More important, the team’s enthusiasm had caught on. “Everyone was so excited,” Lickwar says. “All the people working at the domaine came out to help.”

Timothy A. Schuler, editor of Now, can be reached at timothyaschuler@gmail.com and on Twitter @Timothy_Schuler.