COMMUNITY GARDENS WAS THE THEME FOR THIS YEAR'S CHAUMONT GARDEN FESTIVAL.

You can get to Chaumont by plane from Stansted to Tours then a hire car via Vouvray and Amboise. The wonderful Chenonceau is 10km to the south, Cheverny, Chambord and Blois are up river to the east. Villandry is back west beyond Tours. These are the great French Renaissance formal gardens with parterres in front and pattes d'oie and ronds-point in the countryside behind. The Chaumont festival site a few hundred metres up the hill from the lowering eminence of the chateau of that name is a friendly two fingers to these ur-landscapes. There they are, 30 of them, small and strictly twenty-first century in their oddly shaped hedged enclosures. On show from May to October they are selected annually by a jury of 11 people, most of them establishment landscape architects. This year, the jury has selected a group of landscape architects from around Europe and invited four heavy duty French paysagistes, a couple of city landscape departments and several landscape schools. Unlike the Chelsea Flower Show with its expensive, jazzed-up sub-Jekyll horticulture, Chaumont is about landscape design.

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The community garden theme is not as likely to provoke such surreal design as that notable year when eroticism was the theme. But now as then, many of the chosen landscape architects have politely ignored overt references to the official theme and got on with designing delicious and sometimes enigmatic spaces. The only one this year with surreal pretensions is Eternal Rest the work of the Rome university group, Garage Paesaggio + Cytera. It has a grid of what look remarkably like graves, each with a 'tombstone' formed from lightweight reinforcing mesh for climbing plants. Some 'graves' are white bordered rectangular pieces of turf. Others are in grey gravel on which are set curvaceous rattan deckchairs. The dead and the living in quiet, immobile contemplation, perhaps.

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The most poetic of the designs is probably A.P.ART's Reflexions whose 'roof' and internal 'walls' are made up of an enormous number of mirror plastic strips strung on plastic fishing line. You walk out into the middle of the watergarden along a stone promontory, one end of which enigmatically cants up to raise your head above the mesmeric, fluttering plastic strip 'roof'.

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There is a Calvinist quality in the mathematical austerity of Nordic Dreams by Danish practice, Landskab. It is an ensemble of random saplings set in a white gravel ground plane. You enter through an entrance screen of stacked end-on logs. On the far side is a wall of 3m square plastic sheets back-painted with clouds to create the impression of a Scandinavian sky. Although elsewhere at Chaumont the landscape designers have resorted to weak, overly literal symbolism, the layout of many of the gardens reflects the current tendency to use geometric forms and formal devices. Bruno Marmiroli's Coral Gardens has a 3 x 3 grid--there are also sliding curtains of foliage plus atmospheric mist. Strasbourg students, Marion Robert and Laurent Gongora's Between 2 is an orthogonal maze-like assemblage of rough timber screens, some of which can be rolled up and down to provide alternative routes. Quatrieme Dimension's Species de....' has a tall transverse corridor flanked either side by those long plastic strips you get in warehouse doors. You flail through them to find the ground beyond arranged in planted irregular rows, a design device used by the Belgians, Virginie Pigeon and Sebastien Ochej in their Five for One, a series of narrow parallel timber walkways of different lengths each terminated by shoulder-height mirrors. More austere is Landscape Architecture Bureau's Sharing garden which has just four squares of coloured gravel, one with a single tree, one with four trees, one with 16 and one, at an angle, packed with 64 skinny saplings in a kind of evocation of a mathematical series.

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Among all those clipped and ruled parterres in the chateaux of the Loire this containment and regulation of nature seems perfectly reasonable. You can be sure that the Chelsea judges would hate it.

Photographs: Domaine Regional de Chaumont-sur Loire [C] Mayer--Le Scanff.

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