Jardins de Metis - “Ex Uno, Multis”

Reford Gardens, PQ, Canada | 2023

“Ex uno, multis”

Indigenous groups have long evolved ways to manage bioculturally diverse ecosystems that provide goods and services, and ceremonial spaces essential to life and maintaining cultural traditions. Industrialization and globalisation eroded the relevant function of these landscapes that no longer have the capacity to sustainably meet demand. New land management options are required. Traditional methods of “perennial management” can expand our discourse to address our current and future relationship with the land.

Coppiced trees are intentionally chopped in this garden and have since grown back, creating a landscape of “stools.” Place-based, “ex uno, multis” is both human scale and a reflection of its local surroundings. Three enormous stools provide successional experiences and an interpretation ofsilvicultural spatialities, or “from one, many.”

Visitors are encouraged to wander inside the tension of the macro-micro worlds that surround them and in the shadow of more “high-value” timber, transcending generations. This coups, which embraces globality in its attendees by reducing barriers to speech and fostering a transmission of world perspectives and value systems in a place characteristic of more ceremonial garden arrangements, solicits shade, comfort, and a variety of spatial sequences while passing through.