The International Garden Festival is launching a call for proposals to select designers to create the new temporary gardens for the festival’s 27th edition.

Created by Marie-Josée Lacroix, Denis Lemieux, Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec, and Alexander Reford at the turn of the new millennium, the International Garden Festival is recognized as one of the most important contemporary garden festivals in North America.

The upcoming edition of the festival, which is set to open on June 20, 2026, will take place on the site of Les Jardins de Métis – Reford Gardens and the theme will be “Mapping Sensitivity.”

In the midst of the triennial thematic cycle, which began a year ago, the upcoming theme aims to pursue an ongoing reflection on the “poetics of space” and how we relate to our physical surroundings and the world. While last edition’s theme, “Borders,” focused on the challenges of organizing and representing geographical space and raising geopolitical concerns, the theme of the 27th edition takes “the sensitive turn.”