LESS IS MORE, MORE OR LESS

Respected Landscape Architect and garden designer, Patricia Tyrrell MGLDA shares her insights on this year’s Bloom in the Park show gardens

Orange, yellow and gold were the colours predominating at Bloom this year. Gold medals prevailed, particularly amongst the large garden category. Golden yellow were the colours chosen in Alan Rudden’s Santa

Rita garden, Life is Rosé for his main structural features.

Also, orange and yellow prevailed in the Marie Keating

Foundation SunSmart Garden, created by Peter Cowell and

Monty Richardson to reflect bright sunny colours, and in Kevin

Dennis’s Fruit Juice Matters Garden, where pots and planting echoed the theme.

Bigger sponsorship from charities and public and private sectors was notable this year. This allowed for the creation of some well executed gardens, particularly in the large garden category. This seemed to have a kind of knock-on effect on smaller gardens, which were much fewer in number than previous years. To me at least, this gave an overall impression of fewer gardens and possibly fewer designers getting experience at this level. That said, the quality was up so perhaps less is more.

GARDEN DESIGN CATEGORIES

Bloom garden categories are divided into small, medium, large, and concept gardens. Once again Ruth Liddle presented a wonderful sculpture garden (in the feature garden category), this year in conjunction with Ken Folans. Always a source of inspiration, it would be lovely to see more sculpture used within the show gardens rather than all together in one place.

According to the Bloom rules, concept gardens ‘provide a blank canvas without aesthetic, horticultural or size restrictions’. They offer ‘an enhanced sensory experience’ and are used for ‘conceptual, interactive or play focused exhibits or spaces devoted to raising awareness of important social, economic, humanitarian or environmental issues’. The Cambridge dictionary’s definition of ‘concept’ is a principle or idea. It would seem unlikely that any garden gets to Bloom without an idea or principle, so perhaps the definition needs to be more firmly defined. In other garden shows such as Chelsea and Hampton Court, there is more scope to define your gardens style or principles.

Other garden categories at Chelsea and Hampton Court include artisan gardens, world gardens, and gardens for a changing world and space to grow gardens. Understanding and interpreting gardens and their design and merit can be helped greatly by such categorisation and can also guide and inspire the designer in realising the potential for their ideas. It is confusing

BLOOM SHOW GARDENS 2018

1. FBD INSURANCE’S DEEP PLAY GARDEN BY NIALL MAXWELL AND MARINA ANDREEVA, 2. ALAN RUDDEN’S SANTA RITA GARDEN - LIFE IS ROSÉ, 3. BARRY KAVANAGH’S GARDEN RESISTANCE, 4. TÜNDE SZENTESI’S GREEK THEMED MAMMA MIA, 5. KEVIN DENNIS’S FRUIT JUICE MATTERS, 6. THE SUSTAINABLE SEAFOOD GARDEN BY ANDREW CHRISTOPHER DUNNE

PHOTOS: KORALEY NORTHEN

“It seems a pity with so much space in the Phoenix Park that the garden area always gets so crowded”

to find that Bloom gardens are not categorised as ‘concept’ in advance, but more as a retrospective and it is difficult to see why some of them would end up in this category.

A move towards more defined categories at Bloom and a broader range of categories would be, in my opinion, a positive development. There is often, possibly influenced by sponsors, a tendency towards the literal – ‘This is LITERALLY where you are.’ On a number of levels this tends to weaken a design. In all likelihood, there is probably no set of categories that will satisfy everyone but the current offering is badly in need of some reworking. Recreating a particular space or environment can become so challenging that we forget about the nuances and atmosphere that make it a garden. It can also lose the message which it hopes to carry as it does not speak to the viewer as anything other than what it ‘literally’ is.

A garden that is intensely literal can leave us cold. Nothing new to see here, no questioning, no mystery. At the other extreme are the gardens which try to be all things to all people with no unifying theme or idea. It’s interesting to look at the descriptions of the gardens and correlate this with design medals. The weaker the overall ideas, the less likely they were to end up in the gold medal category.

Amongst the larger gardens generally, the themes varied from the literal to the conceptual. Some were defined by location but had an underlying idea or principle. In Liat and Oliver Schurmann’s gold medal winning garden for FBD Insurance, you were literally on a roof garden, but they offered a strong fundamental concept of looking at nature at close quarters and from a different viewpoint, so elegantly fulfilling the theme of their garden. The structure and reflective water had echoes of their Bloom garden last year. The overall effect was magical!

A principle that we would all like to see more of was embodied in the collaboration between Fingal county councils and the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, The Greener Way for Fingal (front cover), which included a swale and wildflower areas, using the principles of Sustainable Urban Drainage (SUDs) where water is slowed from entering rivers and thus prevents flooding. This has the added benefit of supporting more wildlife. It is great to see County Councils moving forward with these issues in a creative way.

The best in show garden and gold medal winner, and winner of the cutest kid’s award (I made that last bit up) was The Sustainable Seafood Garden. Brave and ambitious, this must have caused Andrew Christopher Dunne a few sleepless nights, trying to figure out how to recreate the interface between sea and land in a small space. It is wonderful to see sculpture as an essential part of a garden space and I loved the fish and the light and shadow play which brought them to life. The greatest challenge with this garden was creating a literal seaside space. Here you had to rely on people’s perceptions and memory to see it the same way. To me the non-tidal nature of The Sustainable Seafood Garden, the planting at the bottom of the quay wall and the surrounding woodland planting made it feel like the Clare side of Lough Derg where small harbours such as this can be found.

The final garden in this line up was Fruit Juice Matters by Kevin Dennis MGLDA. Heroic in it’s attention to detail and level of perfection - sourcing of appropriate furnishings such as those cool orange pots and not a hair out of place in that line of fescues in their slimline pots. Kevin’s adventurous approach to lines and angles makes for extremely interesting and modern spaces. Here the underlying ideas, perhaps even the squeezed carton of juice, produced a sunroom with seriously cool lines. For me, Kevin’s garden was conceptual in nature but if I were standing in front of this garden and asked to guess where I was it might be ‘literally’ at Chelsea Garden Show. Categories are not easy.

One of my favourite gardens at Bloom this year fell firmly into the conceptual garden category, FBD Insurance’s Deep Play Garden by Niall Maxwell and Marina Andreeva. Inspired by the vernacular in both the Irish and Russian countryside, it developed these ideas into a serene and modern space but with a distinctively Irish flavour. The subtle planting was drawn from an original palette, with textures that were inspired by wild planting: Ligusticum scoticum, Aruncus, Iris, Luzula and ferns. A striking bog oak sculpture by Brian O’Loughlin, sourced from the Kildare Gallery, framed by a twisted steel archway, was a focal point of this garden. The reflective water punctuated by angular ‘black holes’ led the eye through the garden and the light and shadow on the water and the walls highlighted the texture and outlines of plants such as the Valeriana officinalis and Eremurus. A well deserved gold medal.

Another conceptual garden which I really loved was Cornelia Raftery’s (MGLDA) gold medal winning No Limits - GOAL’s Garden for Women. Created at short notice, it was a memorable garden. This garden celebrated the role of women in the developing world, highlighting some of the challenges they continue to face. The planting was a mixture of dry arid and lush tropical to represent some of the inequalities that women endure. The tall posts balancing colourful baskets reminded us of the traditional image of women carrying huge loads on their heads, and also served to acknowledge the strength and resilience of women.

Similarly striking was Barry Kavanagh’s garden Resistance for Trocaire for which he also won gold. Challenging in it’s brief to represent four geographical regions – Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Palestine and Ireland - Barry still managed to create a visually unified garden. The sculpture by Ciaran ‘Yohan’ Brennan of a young boy with scorched tree trunks as legs, surrounded by a circle of scorched trees was particularly arresting. This garden reminded us of the plight of human rights and environmental defenders in these countries where Trocaire works.

Tünde Szentesi’s Greek themed Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again garden won a deserved gold medal. Though falling into the literal category it worked really well, as Tünde had payed huge attention to detail and had a narrative going which made it feel like someone’s home and that they might appear

through the door and burst into song at any minute. A simple idea really well executed.

Gardens that appeal to children are few and far between at Bloom so I’m sure they were drawn to the Enchanted Wood garden by Peter O’Brien MGLDA, for which he won silver gilt and best in category. What child (or even adult) wouldn’t want a garden retreat such as this magical treehouse? And what a treehouse it was with a bed, seating and a lookout. Despite this being the smallest garden size, Peter managed to create a natural stream with a really clever trompe-l’oeil archway and a drawbridge over to the enchanted treehouse.

PLANTING

The planting at Bloom gets better each year. The planting in a show garden should have the feeling that it grew there. We should be able to appreciate the plants and yet not see the soil beneath. The plants should be true to the environment they are chosen for and arranged with an understanding of how they can best support the fundamental idea of the design.

Alan Rudden won best planting award, and demonstrated that restraint and subtlety can win out over bright and colourful. Some designers are tempted by all those bright colours to create a ‘bedding scheme’ with unrelated plants which look pretty together and make a splash – a bit like a giant fl ower arrangement.

The natural look has also become very fashionable in show gardens infl uenced by our Chelsea neighbours, though we are in danger of succumbing to a messy interpretation of ‘the natural’, fuelled by the availability of wildfl ower meadow turves into which other perennials, shrubs and trees are then planted. This only works if done well such as in Dan Pearson’s Chatsworth Garden at Chelsea in 2015. Nature has her own order and if not carefully observed just looks messy and disordered. What makes a memorable garden? When you go to Bloom or Chelsea what makes certain gardens remain in your mind whereas others just vanish? You try and try to recall them, but they are not there.

“Without a strong concept a garden can lose its way and the various elements are not unified” A STRONG CONCEPT

Without a strong concept, a garden can lose its way and the various elements are not unifi ed. This is the garden you can’t bring back to mind because your mind couldn’t interpret or read what it was seeing. Our subconscious is a hard task master. It has to be. It evolved to keep track of detail – the familiar and the unfamiliar. Patterns that make sense, those that don’t. Life or death. Knowing where to fi nd food or water, knowing when you are potential food, it’s all in the detail.

Our need to make sense of the world means we are constantly looking for patterns, even if we can’t see the whole picture our brains are quite good at fi lling in the detail. This is why nuance in a garden can work so well. We don’t need the whole picture, but we do need the pieces that we can see to have a strong concept or narrative underpinning them. The garden needs to have unity and coherence. Too many elements that have no connecting thread mean that we can make no sense of the garden, and we switch off .

ATMOSPHERE

To me when people come and look at your garden and linger, just stand and soak up the detail, that is the greatest compliment. Complexity in a garden with richness of detail is important, so that people can relate to the garden. It needs to tell a story, i.e. a reminder of holidays, an overgrown garden of childhood, the plight of refugees etc. It is also to do with light and shadow, fragrances, sound and movement.And it needs a sense of mystery, not all instantly visible. There should be some elements of intrigue or surprise. If it is a garden, it belongs to someone. That someone’s personality should be in the garden.

The late Anthony Bourdain maintained you have to be a romantic to be a good cook. Perhaps it is the same for garden design. To immerse yourself in the theme/concept of your garden, to let your imagination run down various paths and add the layers of meaning necessary for it to be legible and memorable. Follow through on your concept, ask the hard questions, and be brave.

WHERE TO NEXT FOR BLOOM

It seems a pity with so much space in the Phoenix Park that the garden area always gets so crowded. One of the joys of Hampton Court is its openness. There is no jostling, or wheelchair users being swamped by crowds.

Plant sales are a highlight for gardening enthusiasts and a perfect opportunity for nurseries to show off their wares. Providing outdoor sales areas for individual nurseries would allow people to really enjoy the plants and purchase at their leisure. Garden clothing and furniture are only a tiny portion of what’s on off er in the pavilion. A lot of it is unrelated. It is a garden show. The food section is all about food. The garden section should be all about gardens. I believe that the introduction of more design categories and well-defi ned categories would push designers to be more adventurous.

Conceptual gardens, artisan gardens, narrative gardens, gardens celebrating a book or artist, why not? It doesn’t have to be all of these every year, but it would add extra interest and variety and push the boundaries to create more interesting gardens. ✽

PATRICIA TYRRELL

is a Landscape Architect, garden designer, horticulturist and gold medal winner. She can be contacted via her website at living-landscapes.com

PHOTO: VINCENT MCMONAGLE