Apiary Studio worked with Martha Keen, Brian Davis and David Moses to produce this entry into the annual Jardins de Metis international garden design competition. The Aapa mire proposal drew inspiration from the indigenous landscapes of Quebec, taking cues from the local peatlands that are so strange and beautiful, to bring a new and exciting bog garden to visitors. The garden sought to abstract the complex dynamics of a unique ecosystem, much as gardens have always been a simulacrum of wilderness and nature, and celebrate a landscape so vast (13% of Canada) and yet so inhospitable as to be largely unknown to the public at large. Visitors of this garden would not only have taken delight in the splash and play of walking through the garden’s paths set in shallow water, but it was also our intention that that they also might begin to consider how they too could take inspiration from their native landscape to fashion their own environments. The garden would have been surrounded by an earthen berm, carved directly from the site to form an impermeable cell containing a shallow pool. Within the pool would sit a peat mound, sliced by a path to expose the stratifications of organic matter within.

SIZE: .05 acres

YEAR: 2015

LOCATION: Reford Gardens, Grand Metis, QC