DESIGN / 11
I WONDER Highly regarded Landscape Architect, Bloom gold medal winner, Patricia Tyrrell reports in from Bloom 2019 and wonders where the future lies
I
’ve always liked the eighties pop-band, Talking Heads. During my recent participation in the design and construction of a Bloom show garden, the words to their song, Once in a Lifetime, kept running through my head. The song is about life. About the way we can drift along in its current, only surfacing occasionally to see clearly where we are and what we are doing with our lives. Designing and building a Bloom show garden is like being caught in a current. Months of thought and preparation, weeks on site, building intensively, with all the stress, pressure and exhaustion. It consumes you, carries you along. You finally surface as the final touches are put to your garden only to submerge once again… judging, the media, the public, your actual life, your actual job: It’s exhausting. You briefly come up for air as the show closes, then back under during the garden take-down. Eventually you resurface proper and you wonder why?
SO WHY DO DESIGNERS DO IT? Well, it’s complicated and it’s most certainly not about medals and accolades as many people might think. It is about the experience. For example, entering with the students of horticulture at Cabra Community College, it was all about tangibly experiencing the design and build process in real life. To translate abstract learning into something real and doing it as part of a team. This sense of team spirit, of comradery, of community and shared experience is such a part of the Bloom build. You make new friends, share tools, advice, tents, cake, help each other out. It is buoyancy, which keeps us all from succumbing to the intense current of the build period.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS Designers do it because it is an intensely creative process. A compressed, exhilarating and addictive act of creation which draws designers into a flow state. That magical state of
BLOOM GARDENS 2019 FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: DENNIS FLANNERY FINGAL COUNTY COUNCIL; ALEN RUDDEN SANTA RITA; LIAT & OLIVER SCHURMANN BIM; PHOTOS: VINCENT MCMONAGLE
