Climate change and degradation of the living world – such are the new data now confronting the planet’s once temperate areas. These days, fragility, imbalance and uncertainty are our central concerns, requiring each and every one of us to adapt to a changing climate, by minimising the adverse effects of high temperatures, rethinking the way we behave, combating heat islands, and using new and traditional solutions alike in the face of increasing scarcity of shade and water. Moderation, self-sufficiency resulting from permaculture, edible forests and green corridors...everything has to be put to work to reinforce our gardens’ resilience, anticipate, act, bounce back, and reduce vulnerabilities.

Such is the challenge put to the 2023 edition’s garden designers, who have come up with projects that open up avenues enabling gardens – distillations of life and biodiversity – to resist the excesses of the Anthropocene.
In this resilient garden yet to be invented and laid out, all the constraints imposed by our times have been considered and remarkable solutions proposed by its designers, who have succeeded in making their creations distillations of imagination, knowledge and knowhow, maximising the presence of the plant life they contain.