BLUE STICK GARDEN

Blue Stick Garden was created for the inaugural season of the Métis International Garden Festival in 2000. Its inspiration stems from two unique features of the site: the Himalayan blue poppy painstakingly adapted to the region’s microclimate, and the mixed flowering borders of the original heritage garden from the 1920s. Both are the work of Métis Garden founder Elsie Reford, whose designs were undertaken in the spirit of British contemporary Gertrude Jekyll.

We began with an image of the garden’s iconic blue poppy, which was scanned, pixelated, and translated into a collection of long, thin sticks. These were then "planted" to form an abstraction of the traditional Victorian mixed border. Painted blue on three sides and orange on the fourth, the sticks create a chromatic effect that is as surprising as it is simple: a visitor wandering through the labyrinthine installation experiences an ever-shifting set of views and vistas. The sensually engaging experience reinterprets the spirit of colour and movement embodied by the original Reford gardens, injecting it with contemporary visual appeal.

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