Former mayors Xu Kuangdi of Shanghai and Pierre Bourque of Montreal shared a common vision: to create gardens as a testament to the friendship between the two cities and to commemorate the meeting of East and West. In 1990, Shanghai made a gift of the magnificent China Garden to the Montreal Botanical Gardens. A decade later, we reciprocated with the Montreal Garden in Shanghai.

In the heart of Pudong’s Century Park, the Montreal Garden is located in the midst of the landscape mosaic that reflects contemporary China. Located on its own island, the garden takes the general form of a typical Canadian landscape – a rolling meadow under a plantation of poplars. But the aim is not to reproduce a fragment of the nation as much as to evoke specific impressions: the immensity of the landscape, the quality of the forest light, the winding of a carriage path.

The rural landscape paintings of Cornelius Kreighoff and the biomorphic shapes of artist Tony Smith served as twin inspirations for the work, which aims to create a resolutely modern environment rooted in the traditional past: a modern picturesque.