"Chaos" was the designated theme of the 2004 Festival of Gardens in Chaumont, France. Herbert Dreiseitl was invited to design two gardens to, as an artist and landscape architect, investigate and interpret this theme.

The first garden, ‘Tohuwabohu’, was the image of a raw, primeval earth crater, beaten and weathered by wind and rain, with the earth’s first plants (horse-tails fern, Equisetum) sprouting from a life-giving mud soup at the bottom. A dark entrance corridor screens the garden interior from the outside. As the visitor steps inside the garden, mist oozes up from the bottom and curls over the top edges of the crater. A return to a completely different world.

The second garden was titled ‘Solid and Liquid’. Bars of horizontal, blue glass are suspended one above another. Water quietly trickles down, droplets forming on the edges and dripping to
the next glass bar. The bottom edge of each glass piece is cast so that the glass itself seems to drip like water. The border is blurred between where the solid glass stops and the liquid water begins.