The International Garden Festival has begun in Quebec’s Redford Gardens, with five award-winning garden installations open to the public for the first time.

They are being displayed alongside 22 other creations designed for the festival by landscape architects in Canada and around the world.

The prize-winning studios – who hail from Canada, the United States, France and Switzerland – won the right to build their gardens following an international competition contested by 198 rivals.

Since its inception in 2000, more than 150 conceptual gardens have been exhibited at the annual festival, which is hosted on a site adjacent to the famous gardens created by Canadian horticulturist Elsie Reford from 1926 to 1958.

The winning installations on view are:

• Le Caveau by Christian Poules: a complex construction made of stone gabions and earth that support a levitating green platform.

• Cyclops by Craig Chapple: a giant inverted cone, formed of 100 tapering timber planks eight metres in diameter, suspended over the forest floor.

• The Maison de Jacques by Romy Brosseau, Rosemarie Faille-Faubert and Émilie Gagné-Lorange: a ‘forest of beans’ that will grow over time, creating secret gardens for games of hide-and-seek.

• TiiLT by SRCW: a collection of 24 tents that each may be flipped between two orientations, responding to the position of the sun, to offer shifting pathways through the site in a manner that evokes the movement of a school of fish.

• Carbone by Coache Lacaille Paysagiste: a charred tree trunk, partially cut into pieces, that illustrates the primary material used to build furniture – displaying the journey from root to stump to its final use. A young tree grows where the tree might have grown tall had it not fallen.

The gardens will be open every day until 2 October, 2016.

Winning designs announced for International Garden Festival in Canada