The Choose Love Garden

The Choose Love Garden is inspired by refugee migration routes across Europe and the concept of desire lines – paths we create where no formal routes exist. The design reflects the relationship between movement and permanence, travel and home. Uncertainty and flux in refugee journeys is conveyed with a kinetic sculpture, a dry stream bed path representing waterway migrations and a weathered tree that has taken the shape of the wind. Boulder seating provides rest and stillness, yet the rock’s permanence also evokes migrants’ experience of long years in transit camps. In this garden we see linear drifts of plants, representative of those growing along established migration routes, and discover what people grow when they don’t know when or if they’ll go home – when the act of planting becomes an act of hope.