Kate Gould has been invited to design a garden for the Beşiktaş International Garden and Flower Festival in Turkey. The festival will run from May 7th to 15th 2016 and is to become an annual hallmark event for the district.
The theme of this year’s festival is “peace” and it will be curated by the former director of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Stephen Bennett alongside leading garden tutor and RHS judge Andrew Fisher Tomlin .
Commenting on the purpose of the festival, Beşiktaş Mayor Atty. Murat Hazinedar said, “The International Garden and Flower Festival is to give a message. For this reason, we consider this festival, which is thematised with peace, important. Flowers symbolize peace. Let the weapons be flowers, not bullets. And let the tanks scatter flowers, not cannon balls.”
In addition the festival aims to encourage the culture of personal gardening at home and to raise awareness of the botanic and green environment throughout the cities’ public spaces.
Kates Garden is called ‘A Garden of Two Sides’ and explores the idea that the road to peace is a fragile path. One side of the garden is hard and uncompromising with barbed wire, distressed concrete and architectural spiky plants. With perseverance, the journey through this area with its high walls and security fencing leads you to a more peaceful space where the planting is softer, the water is calming and there is communal space to sit and talk. The harsh wall that divides the space is apparent on both sides of the garden and in part on the peaceful side of the garden it is not decorated in any way, reflecting the idea that peace can be fragile and that it does not take much to revert to chaos.