"Journey tales"- Jardins de Métis

Journey tales is a floating garden inspired by the sea travels of botanists and plant hunters around the world.

Coming from the past, it is a storyteller garden, looking to the future, it is an augmented reality.

Ordinary but very important plants, that are cultivated worldwide to provide food or ornament, are displayed on simple bamboo rafts as those still in use by Amazon or Chinese people. Every plant used in the garden has an adventurous, engaging and extraordinary story to tell.

The visitors can pick up a boat hook and use it to approach the bamboo rafts from the small jetty. Fruition through a physical effort remember them to maintain links with the real world.

The plants are labelled with a QR code linking to audio resources that explain the long journeys through time and space they have made to reach our gardens or our tables.

The proposal mixes contemporary and virtual elements with historical and material ones, to stage a rediscovery of common use plants and to remember the importance of the past for the future of gardens