Radicepura Garden Festival announces the Call for Ideas to participate in the fourth edition of the Biennale dedicated to garden design, which will have the theme ‘THE GARDEN OF PLANTS’, based on an idea by Antonio Perazzi, artistic director of the event.

To stimulate reflection on this theme, with his own contribution, could only be Paolo Pejrone, who will create a garden for the festival. The landscape architect has always been the promoter and advocate of a “disorderly” garden capable of growing strong, autonomously and spontaneously, a place of respect and care, as well as hospitable as well described in A simple garden. Stories of happy welcome and harmonious cohabitation (Einaudi).

“When we talk about a garden we are talking about a living, growing entity that changes quickly, there is nothing worse, in fact, than an immobile garden. We have been used to a bourgeois stereotype that has accompanied us for almost two centuries, the English garden, with organized but free spaces …

We grew up with this idea of ​​green which, however, costs in terms of the sacrifices we ask of our neighbor – comments Paolo Pejrone – We must pay attention to resources, the garden must be a small example of homemade ecology; the English lawn is an act of selfishness because it is harmful in terms of water consumed, necessary treatments, hours of shearing.

Let the gardens grow in the Italian style … we use plants from the Mediterranean scrub, in the garden you cannot go against the nature of the places “.

“Having Paolo Pejrone as teacher and guest of the next edition makes me very proud, we are happy at Radicepura to be able to give home to one of his projects because he has always supported a vision, as he himself defines it, of ‘common sense of the garden’ that today we call ecological, a garden that speaks of places, happy coexistences and adaptation processes, in short, a garden that tells about life. Putting plants back in the center means going to seek the profound meaning of this life ”, says Mario Faro, president of the Radicepura Foundation.

With this spirit, Radicepura Garden Festival launches the Call for Ideas 2023, inviting students, landscape architects, agronomists, garden designers, botanists, nurserymen, urban planners, engineers, artists, students, curators and all those who have the skills to design and implement a garden, to participate in the fourth edition of the Festival which will explore the theme “THE GARDEN OF PLANTS”.

The Festival will remain open for a period of six months and, therefore, it will be necessary to consider the evolution of the garden during this period, minimizing maintenance requests. At the end of the edition, the garden that will have evolved best over the six months of the event will receive the Gardenia Award, a special award from the gardens magazine.

The international call is open to under 36 – individual professionals or teams of emerging architects – for the construction of 6 gardens that address the proposed theme. There will also be 1 garden reserved for the over 36 category. The gardens will be built in Radicepura, the botanical park in the province of Catania, in Giarre – between Etna and the Ionian Sea – in close communication with the other gardens designed by renowned landscape architects. international and works of art.

Garden designers will have the opportunity to express their creativity, making use of the most original plants grown in the Piante Faro nursery, which collects more than 3000 different species of tropical, succulent, aromatic plants, Mediterranean trees and citrus fruits. Participation in the competition is free and the 7 projects selected by the jury will have a budget of 10,000 euros available for supply of plants and construction materials.

In a first phase, the designers will be invited to join the Call with an idea that is convincing enough to allow access to a selection, from which a short-list of participants will be selected, who will be invited to produce a detailed project for a specific area that will be assigned to it. Among these will be the final selection of the 7 winners who will be called to create their garden in the park of the Biennale di Radicepura, where the projects will remain on display for the duration of the Festival.

The list of the 7 winning gardens will be communicated to the interested parties by January 27, 2023.

Applications for Phase 1 will be accepted until November 14, 2022.

To participate, download the announcement from the website https://www.radicepurafestival.com/call-for-ideas-2023/

Text and photos from the web