Orange power, Ponte de Lima, Portugal

At the International Garden Festival 2006 in Ponte de Lima, Portugal, an orange tree (Citrus x sinensis) was placed at the center of the team’s design, with fifty thousand orange plastic balls at its foot – representing the harvest of a single orange tree over the course of one hundred years. The firm took the festival’s theme, ‘Energy in the Garden,’ as an opportunity to reflect on gratitude for the wonders of nature and chose the orange tree as a symbolic gesture because it has been cultivated for over four thousand years and because it is a plant that has connected East and West throughout history. Citrus fruits are evocative of Southern Europe and have symbolic importance in China and the Far East.