Landscape Architecture Professor Phoebe Lickwar Collaborates on International Garden Festival Work

Phoebe Lickwar

The "Into the Woods" garden is part of the 2018 International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire in France.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A University of Arkansas landscape architecture professor collaborated on a garden design that was selected for the 2018 International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire, a historic castle in France's Loire River Valley.

The "Into the Woods" garden was designed through a collaboration between the landscape architecture firms FORGE, based out of Fayetteville, and RAFT, based out of Brooklyn, New York. The garden will be on display at the festival through Nov. 4, along with 23 other works from Russia, United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Canada and France  all centered on the theme "Gardens of Thought."

The 1,750-square-foot garden was designed by Phoebe Lickwar, associate professor of landscape architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design and founding principal of FORGE; Hannah Moll, Fay Jones School alumna (B.L.A. '17) and landscape designer at FORGE; Matthew Donham, 2017 Garvan Visiting Professor in the Fay Jones School and founding principal of RAFT; and Andersen Woof, landscape designer at RAFT.

"The theme for this year's festival, 'Gardens of Thought,' called for literary inspiration," Lickwar said. "I chose a Jorge Luis Borges story, 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' for its obvious association with the garden, but also for its preoccupation with interconnectedness and time."

Borges' story follows the narrator as he journeys through a tangled garden of crossroads, and then discovers that the life's work of his ancestor is a disorienting novel of interconnected realities. The garden, "Into the Woods," interprets the story's fantastical experience by provoking visitors to get lost in time and space within a lush forest. Maze-like paths wind in and around dense woods, intersected by balance beams that provide a series of elevated shortcuts. At each crossroads, visitors must choose a path without a clear sense of orientation.

Lickwar and Donham, former colleagues who have worked together on the National September 11 Memorial in New York and co-taught a design studio in the Fay Jones School, decided to make the project a collaboration between their firms, and they also brought on Moll and Woof.

Lickwar said she and Donham have long discussed the need for landscape architecture to engage the public in the cultivation of public landscapes over time, and Lickwar's own research on productive landscapes has informed her interest in combining productivity and public space. This competition offered the chance to put those ideas into practice by testing the aesthetic potential of plant material that is typically used for reforestation or renewable energy production.

"It's a synthesis of utilitarian productivity and cultural expression," Lickwar said.

The team spent a month developing a plan to bring Borges' story to life through a garden. Lickwar said they used screen-sharing software to conduct virtual design charettes and discussions since the firms are located in different states.

"We worked primarily through drawing and modeling to test different ideas, giving physical form and structure to the design concept for the garden while investigating ideas about the materiality through research of short rotation forestry," Lickwar said.

The thoughtful choices and simplicity of the garden's material palette allow the physical experience to take center stage.

"We burned the wood balance beams black, on site, using the Japanese shou sugi ban technique to reference the ultimate lifespan of a tree, prolonged for human use through fire," Lickwar said. "Moving through the trees along the beams is a unique experience, one that emphasizes the scale of the body in relation to the young forest and demands a sense of balance and attention to movement."

She said even though the garden is composed of small saplings - more than 400 - the forest is dense enough to create a sense of mystery and creates a place to get lost. A thick understory of ferns, sedges, wild strawberry, barrenwort and hardy geranium further encourages visitors to lose their way.

"You cannot, at any point, gain an overview of the whole garden - it resists the picturesque in favor of direct experience in the moment," Lickwar said. "Light, sound, color and movement are fundamental to this garden, and to the human experience of landscape. And in our increasingly digital world, this kind of direct experience of the real world seems more and more precious."

Lickwar said visitors can choose how they experience the garden, whether they want "a meditative experience of slow walking along a winding path, gravel crunching beneath your feet, or an exciting playful experience of moving, jumping, running along a series of elevated balance beams."

One of the biggest challenges was finding a supplier for the trees, Lickwar said. The design called for small, tightly spaced saplings of birch, alder, sycamore maple, willow and poplar. The trees needed to have the right form, with low branching to create the desired density, and be sourced from a nursery in France at the right price to meet their budget. Lickwar and Donham made a trip to France in January, where they found a nursery, Naudet, that met their needs.  

Lickwar's team installed the garden in just five days, whereas many of the other teams took between one and three months to construct their gardens. The team planned every step of their construction process beforehand, and then constructed the garden in March with the help of four others: Daphne Edwards, Jenny Sasson, Charles Myers and Raafi Rivero. Rivero, a filmmaker in Brooklyn, recorded the installation process and will be working with Lickwar and Donham to make a film about the ideas underpinning the garden. 

"Into the Woods" was selected from more than 300 design proposals for the International Garden Festival, which is in its 27th year. Over six-plus months, the festival is expected to attract more than 400,000 visitors from around the world.