During the 19th and 20th of last month, the [Congress](http://www.apevc.cat/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=37&Itemid=54&lang=es) of the Association of Green Space Professionals of Catalonia took place in Lleida. Among the activities that were part of this event, as in the [previous edition](http://www.salagraupera.com/es/bloc/item/113-speed-gardening-en-olot-i), was the II Garden Competition.
On this occasion, the participating teams were also made up of students, professionals and companies in the sector. These teams had five hours for the materialization of the proposals for the Competition, in which Sala Graupera has collaborated by providing the plants for the realization of the gardens.
In this edition, it is worth mentioning the presence of proposals that stood out for their creative freedom and more plastic solutions, without neglecting such an important aspect in this type of event as the presence and use of vegetation in the development of the proposals.
The choice of the winner of the Competition was made through a popular vote of the more than two hundred attendees of the Congress. And the proposal awarded first prize was the garden titled Tema3/El Suelo, work of two final year students from the [Barcelona School of Agriculture](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1B_ZmZvwOd9GxCUf2_J5j-HrA1MSItRu7bsuIW_IHBns/edit#slide=id.g8fd3fbca3_2_0). In this intervention, one of the parts of the garden that is usually forgotten was highlighted, the soil, and its intention was manifested with enormous clarity in the subtitle of its proposal, "tearing off a piece of garden". With this intention, they created a garden of roots, where the garden itself was displaced, elevated on a pergola and the soil and roots became the protagonists of the space, showing that part of the gardens, which is its base and support but that normally remains hidden from us.
Beyond the aesthetic and conceptual nuances of the proposal, where the authors focused the gaze on the soil, this theme would also be closely related to the theme of the Congress, which on this occasion dealt with trees as the structure of urban greenery; as well as some of the most interesting debates that arose during the congress were also closely related to the soil.
Given the intentions of the Tema3/El Suelo proposal, vegetation was relegated to a secondary role, located at height, but on the pergola you could distinguish some species such as _[Grevillea "Robyn Gordon"](http://www.salagraupera.com/es/cataleg/general/item/grevillea-robyn-gordon-2)_ formed in a crown that symbolized tree elements, some scattered specimens of Lomanda longifolia "Tanika" and some Ophiopogon japonicus, on the perimeter, which represented the herbaceous layer of the garden.
The other three gardens presented Paisaje Humanizado, La Caja Verde and ¡Ya llegamos!, as well as some of the species with which these proposals counted, we will present to you in the next post.