Into the Woods

2018 Festival International des Jardins Chaumont-sur Loire, France 

Design Team: Phoebe Lickwar, Matthew Donham, Hannah Moll, Anderson Woof

Build Team: Phoebe Lickwar, Matthew Donham, Hannah Moll, Anderson Woof, Daphne Edwards, Jenny Sasson, Charles Myers

2018 Prix de la Création 

2019 ASLA-TX Merit Award 

Into the Woods was selected from over 300 international entries for the 2018 Festival International des Jardins at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur Loire, France. The Festival, notable for its tradition of avant-garde design, draws over 400,000 visitors from around the world. Previous participants include West 8, Turenscape, Peter Walker, Peter Latz, Emilio Ambasz, and Pritzker Prize winners Wang Shu and Dominique Perrault. 

Into the Woods explores the potential of a new urban woodland integrating agroforestry and urban culture. The garden was inspired by a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths. Composed of species hybridized for rapid growth in the renewable energy sector, the garden invites visitors to get lost in time and space within a lush juvenile forest. Curvilinear paths wind in and around the dense woods, intersected by balance beams providing a series of elevated short-cuts. 

Visitors are invited to meditate on their course and interaction with both the trees and people they encounter along the way. By intensifying human experience using young plants, Into the Woods challenges the profession’s focus on large, pre-grown plants, at a time when more carbon-efficient methods are critically needed. The garden facilitates an experience of plants as living beings, exceeding the kinds of relations we typically have with crops, which are largely human-centered and framed in terms of utility and control.