SECOND NATURE
Competition | The International Garden Festival – 26th EDITION 

Site: Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens_Quebec, Canada
Project: 2025
Team: Luigi Ferrara, Tama Matsuoka Wong, Maria Grazia Mattei, Kevin Santus, Arianna Scaioli, Maria Scandroglio, Guillermo Sanchez Cardenas.

The garden invites visitors to gather around a fourteen-meter-long table conceived as a shared ground for encounter, care, and observation. Its surface is covered with a layer of Agrowool that becomes a living canvas, where edible and aromatic seeds can be planted using small wooden sticks. This simple gesture introduces a quiet and deliberate action, one that requires attention, patience, and a willingness to wait. Planting is not framed as a productive task, but as an act of care and shared authorship.
The table functions simultaneously as a cultivated surface and as a social space. Visitors are encouraged to sit, talk, rest, or simply remain still, observing the gradual transformation of the garden as growth unfolds at its own pace. Time is slowed down, and attention shifts from immediate results to processes of becoming. The garden thus creates a condition where human presence is measured not through intensity, but through duration and repetition.
The project introduces a second layer by doubling the garden through a digital connection. A screen allows visitors to see an identical table located in Milan, where other participants are planting and cultivating different seeds. The two gardens evolve in parallel, connected in real time yet never identical. Each reflects distinct gestures, environmental conditions, and rhythms of care.
Through this mirroring, the project generates a living map of conviviality that extends across distance and culture. Plants become traces of human presence, recording moments of interaction, waiting, and attention. The garden is not defined as a fixed place, but as an ongoing process, where shared acts of tending create fragile bonds between people, environments, and time.