The Paradise courtyard draws from the early history of garden design: The eternal search for paradise. From Eden to today, the garden seeks places of discovery and imagination where one can become ‘lost’ within the city.

This multi-functional, scale-expanding courtyard surface features a water garden with a specimen Bald Cypress tree. These trees, which are known to thrive in wet, swamp-like conditions of the south-eastern United States, can grow beyond their range in Toronto because of the courtyard’s sheltered microclimate. The distinctive structure of the Bald Cypress roots is a source of intrigue for the courtyard landscape. With their ability to grow with their roots flooded most of the year, Bald Cypress trees devlop “knees” - conical projections up to 1m high growing from the roots.
The beautifully engraved soapstone plaza of the courtyard is designed to be seasonally dynamic. It is programmed to be flooded intermittently and the air cooled by fog, changing the character and use of the space throughout the day. When dry, the courtyard is programmable for events and gatherings. When wet, it is transformed into an inhabitable water-sheet: a contemplative space like no other in the city.

The garden is a tribute to the peculiar plant architecture of the Bald Cypress Taxodium distichum. By making a reference to an ecology far beyond our local geography (the southern Louisiana Bayou) and featuring a rarely seen tree (Bald Cypress) in its northern reach, the garden showcases the unique physiological ability of plants to adapt and thrive under changing climatic conditions globally, while taking full advantage of the specific micro-climate conditions offered by the courtyard’s orientation and enclosure.

The underlying question in (re)conceptualizing this enduring form of garden is: What does it mean to relate plants to place, but also to relate plants to each other in the context of climate adaptation?