Diarmuid Gavin on being the Willy Wonka of gardening

Diarmuid Gavin is trying to explain how eccentric humour like that from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory inspired his garden display at Dundrum Town Centre, but he is being stalked by a grandmother in wraparound Bono shades.

“Are you the gardener? I’m not sure if it’s you – I’m a bit short sighted.”

Gavin smiles, more sheepishly than you’d expect for a celebrity, and goes over to make her day. The delighted woman regularly brings her two grandsons to see the fantastical garden, she says. But she can’t believe her luck that, today, the guy off the television who designed it is on hand to explain the concept.

It is almost a quarter past the hour now, and a small crowd – some adults but mainly children – gathers in anticipation. You see, this is no ordinary garden. This one is magic.

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Every 15 minutes, it bursts into life. Trees spin, haunted bushes bob up and down, and the roof lifts off the folly tower to the strains of Pure Imagination from the Wonka film.

If you gave the film director Tim Burton a trowel, a bunch of plants and permission to dig up your lawn, he'd build you something like this.

It’s quite bonkers, really. But it works in an otherworldly, eerie, enchanting kind of way. Gavin originally built it at a cost of £400,000 for last year’s Chelsea flower show, but this year he moved it to Dundrum, where it stays all summer.

He watches on, beaming, as kids point and gasp at his creation. I ask him if the reactions of people to the garden are as much a part of his design as the agapanthus or the pond. “That’s exactly it,” he says, his eyes widening with delight.

I can appear very easygoing but I'm not. I can be . . . challenging.

Easily the most famous gardener in Ireland and perhaps also in the UK, he runs a multinational design business and has a 20-year media career. But the notion that people “get” his vision is what seems to genuinely stir him.

He appears a complex character, does Gavin. Driven, excitable, “a dreamer” he says, but ever so slightly skittish. There is a definite touch of the Wonka in him.

There is a touch of the businessman, too.

Diarmuid Gavin Designs is currently entering the lucrative Chinese market with a local partner. He is in the midst of major design projects for the National Trust and for local councils in the UK.

He also designs gardens for wealthy private clients such as the denizens of the south of France. He has a fruitful partnership with retailer Harrod’s and he has also lent his name to paving stone designs for Kilsaran.

And there are many more potential opportunities in the world of product design, he says.

Yet, despite protestations to the contrary, Gavin still seems like he is searching for more with his work. Like a man who sometimes struggles to please himself, he is his own biggest critic. He should lay off himself a bit; lie back on the grass, enjoy the sun, turn off the iPad. You’ve cracked this business, mate. Enjoy it.

“I can appear very easygoing but I’m not,” he admits eventually. “When things are going great, I can be fantastic. But when things aren’t going great, I can be ... challenging. I’m passionate about getting things right. Maybe my way of dealing with that wouldn’t be the best way.”

Angry young man

Gavin was, he admits, the “angry young man” of gardening in the 1990s. Born in London to Irish parents who were far from wealthy, the family returned to live in Rathfarnham, Dublin when he was a month old.

He was a shy kid – “I’d turn red if anybody even looked at me”.

Gavin has spoken in the past about the impact of his father’s depression and alcoholism, and also the tragic childhood death of his brother, Conor, in a traffic collision. But I don’t ask him about these things today. What more could you expect him to say? Such things mark people, and the marks will always be there for anybody who looks hard enough to see. He had to get on with his life.

Bushy Park in Terenure wasn’t far from Gavin’s house growing up.

“It has a great woodland area, with a lake and bamboo around it. It inspired me. I knew I loved gardens and design. But I also loved Willy Wonka and stuff like that. I couldn’t understand why there had to be walls between those sort of things. I wanted to break those walls down.”

After he finished school, he got a job in a Dublin seed shop, Mackey’s, which he loved. It helped break his shyness somewhat. After that, he studied at the horticultural college at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin.

"It was very good for the science of gardening, but not brilliant for design. It was the 1980s. If Gertrude Jekyll [an Edwardian-era garden design guru] hadn't done it, you weren't allowed to do it. People just wanted pretty gardens."

Gavin came out of college and went into business for himself, registering esoteric business names such as Trees to Please. He had a brash, contemporary style and, eventually, some decent success in Ireland, winning medals for his designs at Irish shows.

"But that is something I have never gotten over in this marketplace. Gardening is a social order and you have to know your place. I suppose I really was and still am seen as brash. Which is fine, because I am brash. I want to be brash. Top of the Pops and Michael Jackson were my influences."

I don’t think Gavin is really all that brash. If I were a shrink, and he was lying on my couch and paying me €100 an hour, I’d probably tell him that, back then, he was likely overcompensating for his innate shyness.

Gavin married Justine Keane, the daughter of gossip columnist Terry Keane and judge Ronan Keane. The bright lights of the UK beckoned.

In 1994, he visited the Chelsea Flower Show in London and “realised this was the pinnacle”. He saw it as the outlet for his contemporary design style, even if everybody was obsessed with winning medals, which he says he wasn’t.

The next year, Gavin returned with his own garden. He needed £60,000 but he only had £300, and went looking for a sponsor. He met a wealthy Irish business family. I promised him I wouldn’t name them. They’re well known.

“I visited their home. The wife said she wanted a garden to win the gold medal. I said I had no interest in that. She left the room without even saying goodbye. It was rude. The husband was warmer, but their company wouldn’t sponsor me.”

Medals culture at Chelsea

He eventually got money together for a “twee Irish garden”. He returned with a contemporary design in 1996, when he also wrote an article lambasting the medals culture at Chelsea, the heart of the English gardening establishment. He became notorious.

Gavin was soon doing television shows. The media feted him as a natural on camera and he was living the London high life in the city where he was born. He drank and partied then, a lot, it sounds like. He doesn’t drink now.

"We worked hard. But when we weren't working, well, we played. It all crept up on me. We were invited everywhere. My mother was a fan of Tony Blair, and next thing I'm bringing her to Downing Street to meet him. We made the most of it. We could do anything."

Two hoity toity Englishmen were chatting and didn't know I was there. One guy told the other I had become a part of the establishment

Gavin has now had nine Chelsea shows. His life has been shaped by the currents and eddies to his media career – books, shows, and also by the birth 13 years ago of his daughter, Eppie. But all the while he has been gardening, designing, creating. The family lives in Ireland now, near Enniskerry in Wicklow.

Gavin recalls being asked to give a speech five years ago for the Horticultural Trades Association in London. All the UK gardening establishment was there.

“I had been in the wilderness for a few years. It happens, that’s fine. But my speech actually went down really well.”

He likes giving speeches, but hates the small talk afterwards.

“I wanted to disappear afterwards, but I badly needed a piss. I went to the toilet, but it was packed so I waited. Two hoity toity Englishmen were chatting and didn’t know I was there. One guy told the other I had become a part of the establishment. I had to leave to save my embarrassment. I didn’t even get to piss.”

Maybe he is a part of the establishment now. That’s the price, or perhaps the privilege, of success. The trick is to turn that into a stream of business.

Gavin used to employ project managers and architects for his design business, but now he doesn’t employ anyone. He subcontracts all of that out.

His biggest ongoing projects include a huge contemporary garden at Gibside estate in Tyne and Wear, the home of the Queen of England’s late mother. The design is finished. Work won’t start for another year, and it will take 18 months to complete.

He is also working on a huge industrial-inspired design set within a bridge across the Tyne for Gateshead council. He seems particularly enthused by that project. Think a Geordie Borough Market crossed with a city garden.

Speculative stuff

In China, Gavin is working with a local partner company, CBTC International Trade, which also has an operation in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. CBTC also run a tulip show outside Shanghai. Gavin is impressed with how they do business, and he has signed up to do major garden designs for local authorities who are building eco-towns. He may also do some “speculative stuff” for Chinese private clients, the new wealthy and middle class.

“CBTC find the clients. They have the relationships with the local authorities. Gardening in the style of Chelsea is a a new thing in China. But things can be done on a grand scale. Decisions are made very fast, and we really get to create.

“I’ve had frightening dealings with local authorities in Ireland, such as Cork. You don’t get that in China.”

The Cork reference is a nod to an infamous public row with the council over the costs for his hanging Sky Garden, another Chelsea creation that was to move permanently to Cork in a deal also backed by Fáilte Ireland. Costs spiralled during the recession-era plan, sparking controversy.

Gavin fell out with the council, although elements of the scheme were incorporated into the revamped Fitzgerald Park.

Gavin admits he is sometimes tempted to do a large volume of work in China to get mega-rich, but the feeling “passes like a mirage... it doesn’t last long”. China is China. Home is home.

The deal with Dundrum and its owner, Hammerson, has opened Gavin’s eyes to the potential of the shopping centre market. There are other potential commercial opportunities in his home market coming down the track.

However, Gavin says he is often overlooked here for major work from wealthy private clients. He mentions the word “snobbery”. I imagine he’s probably secretly delighted if he can still manage to get up people’s noses.

Gavin’s father passed away in 2011. He says he didn’t lose the last of his shyness until then, which is extraordinary for a media personality. He doesn’t know why it happened that way.

He recalls his father as being “psycho-proud” of him, but he also tells a rather personal story about his father thrusting a UK article under his nose that asked if he was “taking the piss”. This sort of brutal honesty is Gavin’s way – it’s disarming, but he appears utterly genuine.

He reiterates his satisfaction with everything about his career now. I’m not sure, but what do I know? Nothing. I couldn’t pot a Busy Lizzie.

Gavin finishes. Plans to make, People to meet. Gardens to grow.

“I pinch myself, because people let me do what I want. I create what I want. You can only do this if you have an idea you will give everything up for it. You can’t fake it. You can’t pose. You’d only find yourself out, and that would be the worst. If you believe that much, you’ll accept whatever comes.”

Name: Diarmuid Gavin

Position: Garden Designer

Age: 53

Family: Married to Justine, with a daughter, Eppie.

Home: near Enniskerry, Co Wicklow

Something about him that might surprise: “I’m complicated, but maybe that wouldn’t surprise some people.”

Something that you’d expect: “I love digging.”