These ever-changing art exhibits live in a Quebec garden

There's a particular nostalgia that laces itself to the act of returning to a place. Seven years after I first set foot here, I return to the Jardins de Métis at the very edge of maritime Québec's Gaspésie region, a Nordic climate where the opposite bank is far enough away that it feels like the open ocean. Though these thousands of blooms inspire peace, I contemplate how the world has been through the ringer since I last walked through them.

The gardens started in 1887 as the project of Elsie Reford, who was born in Perth, Ontario, and grew up in Montreal with her wealthy family that made its fortune from banking, railroads and the textile industry. First opened to the public in 1962, the nearly 45-acre outdoor site became a balm for many during the pandemic when the constriction of our homes squeezed a little too tightly.

This year, the gardens are showcasing the theme of adaptation through their annual art festival, on to October 2 — a theme that's pertinent both to the space and our era. According to Alexander Reford, the establishment's director and Elsie's great-grandson, adaptation has been at the centre of this project from the get-go. The matriarch learned through trial and error that you don't fight nature — you work with it. 

For the festival's 23rd edition, five new pieces were added to past standouts, building on an outdoor exhibit that now showcases 35 landscape architects and artists from around the world. Unlike some interactive exhibits, the growing collection uses natural spaces and physical objects rather than VR and headsets to draw viewers in.

The festival's latest creations partially responded to COVID and the shaky future it shepherded in while also pushing artists to think about what's next, for all of us and the morphing spaces we inhabit. Pieces like Gravity Field — made up of dozens of suspended plastic domes from which over 100 sunflowers grow upside down — both highlight the sun-seeking plant's incredible adaptability and call back to the site's artistry going back a century and a half.

"I think it makes people realize that gardens are an art form," says Alexander. "It's quite complicated because they're using materials which are living. So, they're beautiful today, and then tomorrow, they look like nothing because the flower is gone."

Though this garden is undeniably exceptional, there's a quote in the main building — the family's house-turned-museum — from Alexander claiming that Elsie would be horrified to know she has mostly been remembered as a gardener. The historian-turned non-profit creator and art festival founder wears many hats and appreciates depictions of people that resist simplicity. He strives to keep his great-grandmother's  life as a complicated figure alive, with her passion for sports, politics, music and art collection on display.

• Les fabuleux jardins d'Elsie Reford: Listen on CBC Radio-Canada

He also doesn't hide her at-times contradictory conservatism: a feminist who didn't want women to have the right to vote, and a conservationist before her time with her desire to preserve her luxurious home and the river she fished. It seems like her Renaissance Woman tendencies have been passed along to him too, and that his ancestor would approve of the space's polymorphism. 

Alexander acknowledges how his family's wealthy background upheld this place, and he in turn tries to make it a little more accessible with offerings like free entry on the first Sunday of the month and free admission for kids. An exhibit on throughout this late summer and early fall also speaks to this question of access to natural spaces: Toronto-born Jeffrey James' photographs of the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted's famous parks.

With this year marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Olmsted, who designed Central Park and Montreal's Mount Royal Park, the exhibit is a logical extension of the garden's updated mission. Olmsted is in large part responsible for creating the landscape architect field which Alexander brings front and centre.

"He had this real sort of democratic belief that if you could give people public spaces, then the rich and the poor could meet in a kind of a neutral zone, and the world would be a better place," says Reford, taking a page from the architect's utopian outlook. "We've got this opulent heritage, but we're trying to make it accessible, insofar as we can." 

Sitting at a window-facing table at the site's Villa Estevan Lodge — a restaurant that brings the region's terroir to life — Alexander tells me how he co-created a non-profit and returned to this place to buy it back from the government in 1995. It was five years after this loop back that he started building the arts festival to breathe new life into the historic destination. The same changing flow of inspiration is present in the kitchen, led by executive chef Frédérick Boucher since 2019 when he also returned to his nearby hometown of Price, Québec, to build upon the artistic flare at the estate's fine dining restaurant.

The restaurant building, which dates back to 1886, is covered in warm-coloured wood slats, while prints by Alexis Aubin-Laperrière adorn the walls. His pieces are made by using the traditional Japanese fish printing technique of gyotaku, dipping a salmon in sumi ink and pressing it onto washi paper. These pieces create a visual call-back to the founder's love of fishing in the Mitis River while giving an updated take on that historical tidbit. Dishes get a similarly locale-inspired treatment, with plant-based help from 150 edible species growing on the grounds.

"The gardens are an ideal place to experiment with creativity," says Boucher. "My artistic process often starts with observing what's going on in the gardens, the different blooms, local products and the general ambiance here."

This entire place is continuously changing, both artistically and seasonally, while also remaining a constant through the decades. My return feels as if I'm marking the passing of time. By being a living framework which other pieces are placed onto, parts of that historical and botanical foundation always shine through like a pentimento. In the process, new and adapted interpretations emerge, like an upside-down sunflower turning toward the sun.