First Annual Memphis in May

Garden Design Competition

Honoring the Country of South Korea

 - Won by the design team at Greg Touliatos and Associates.

            This year was the first annual garden design competition held at the Memphis Botanical Garden .  South Korea was the country honored during this annual festival.   The design competition centered on creating a garden that best represented South Korean culture. 

           The entries were submitted from the best garden designers in our area.  The finished gardens were on display from April 10^th through June 1^st.   Each entry was judged by Kunso Kim.  He is a Korean-American who is the Curator of Living Collections for the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois (outside of Chicago ).  We were thrilled when we were declared the winner in this inaugural competition.

 The garden space for each competitor is 20� x 20�.  This is not a big space to devise themes that represent an entire country.  This did not hinder our designers from manipulating the space to show some key features of Korean society.  The area was divided into three sections.  The first third represents a rice field.  There is a worker bending over tending to his field.  In Korean culture �Rice is life.�  This rice field represents man in harmony with nature.  The second area is a stone creek bed that divides the garden.   This represents the division between the agricultural society and the urban culture that has become such a dominant feature of modern times.  The third section represents the urban surroundings of the city and man�s control over this space.  In the back of the exhibit is a wooden hut that shows the utilitarian nature of the people.

 The first competition was a challenging project to put together.  It tried to represent a part of Korean culture.  In fact it helped to teach us a little bit about a country that we knew even less about and that�s the whole point.