Natural Pleasures

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In the elegant grounds of the chateau de Chaumont — deep in France's Loire Valley — a line of small children snakes its way past the entrance of the Garden of Inebriation at this year's International Garden Festival. Behind a beech hedge, several rows of vines are laden with bunches of stylized female breasts. Gourds with furry vaginal openings hang from the branches while suggestively shaped mushrooms sprout from the soil. Over in the corner, a spring-loaded bench shoots rigid phallic protuberances into the anatomy of any visitor unwary enough to pause upon it for a rest. Are the organizers trying to add sex education to the children's nature studies? Valérie Limet, a festival guide, looks perplexed as she explains that school kids don't visit this garden. "And anyway," she adds, "it's supposed to be a joke."

Humor is prominent at this year's festival, which is organized around the theme of "eroticism in the garden." "Like eroticism, humor has disappeared from modern gardens and that's a shame," says director Jean-Paul Pigeat, who hopes that the 27 gardens on show at Chaumont will do something to redress the balance. They certainly offer a stunning variety. Ranging from Zen austerity to sumptuous carpet-bedding, the festival presents visitors with a snapshot of the latest ideas from cutting-edge landscape architecture. The gardens were chosen from 450 projects submitted from all over the world. As at each of the festival's 10 previous editions, the successful applicants were each provided with a 240-sq-m plot, a maximum budget of ?12,000 and left to get on with it. Pigeat admits that this year's theme was intended to be "a bit of fun" but insists that it's not just a pitch for visitors: "Eroticism is the basis of gardening," he explains. "Until the mid-19th century, sensibility and sensuality were integral to the way people experienced a garden."

Only a few of this year's creations take the eroticism theme literally. Not far from the Garden of Inebriation, In Need of Support offers more student high-jinks in the form of two giant pink polystyrene breasts. Far more successful are the gardens that adopt a more poetic approach, like the stunning Blurry Garden designed by a team from Barcelona. Sheets of white gauze create a multilayered vista of black volcanic soil with white heliotropes at ground level and wispy Japanese willows. When the sun hits the light mist dispersed by overhead vaporizers, rainbows pulse through the air between the shimmering white veils. "Only 20% of the plants in this garden are human selections," explains Erwan Boudard, librarian at Chaumont's International Conservatory of Parks, Gardens and Landscaping, which organizes the event. "The majority are plants found wild across the planet."

Plants aren't always the dominant feature, though. In the Italian-designed Out of Orbit, five mossy mounds rise from a trapezoid of gray slate chips surrounded by water. From each mound, a group of straight-stemmed plants stretches up toward a large red globe suspended overhead in black netting — by mid-August they'll be touching. All Chaumont's exhibits evolve from day to day; the International Garden Festival lasts from June through to late October. "Our gardens are experiments," says Pigeat. "We let them grow and watch what happens."

From the wasteland peepshow of Erotomania/Erotomachia to the damp undergrowth of Vice or Versa, many of this year's designers have used wild flowers and plants as a motif. Also in evidence is a desire to update some set pieces from garden history that have fallen into disuse: Blurry Garden and the Dance of the Seven Gardens revisit the mazes that once graced so many country houses, while Green Phantasy Landscape reinterprets the grotto from Italian Renaissance landscape gardening. "The festival aims to pass brand new, contemporary ideas on to the general public," says Pigeat. Last year, 165,000 visitors answered his call to "come and steal our ideas" and this year he's hoping for 200,000. Once they get home, who knows what they may get up to with a trowel and, perhaps, some latex rubber?