
Memphis In May - Korean Garden
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 10th through June
1st. 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.
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