The Island Boat

The Island Boat is a temporary garden realized in the 2022 Shenzhen Flower Show. The theme of the show was “Carbon neutrality, energy saving, environmentally friendly”.

Is it a garden carbon free or not? Could be a garden environmentally friendly? The future should more and more think, reflect and act to turn into ecology sustainably and energy saving, although several time it happens to see that the research for more sustainably seem more like greenwashing.

So, what is really sustainable or sometimes it ends more in marketing that in real solutions? What could be the role of a garden in this great deal of our times? Could be a garden carbon zero? How could the world solve this global and straight issue that all the world should be facing in the next years? The answer is complex and involved several sides of our lives.

How could a garden help, and how could a garden festival declare these principles? They are anxious for the future, but they believe in the next generation, they believe in education as landscapers.

So, the project does not claim to find solutions, but rather wants to be like an educational garden, a garden that can strike the imagination inspiring reflections on the fragility of the ecosystem but also on the power and potential that nature has to offer.

They believe that water must play a fundamental role, in the environment protection because water is and will be the main theme of the future sustainability of the planet: the saving of water; the protection of the oceans; the respect of the ocean biodiversity; the climate warming that until now has been absorbed by the oceans, but also the guarantee of drinking water for everyone, always.

They took inspiration from this plant monument, which is the wreck of Edith Cavall boat, that in 1924 ran aground in a river in Saint Laurent du Maroni, French Guiana, and became an island with lush vegetation.

The area of the garden is invaded of water, the boat strands on it and become the garden, a floating forest composed of plants from all over the world with incursions of plants that are in danger of extinction.