Patiently designing a visual treat

GROW:Jane McCorkell's show gardens have won a gold medal at Bloom for the past four years and she is busy working on her fifth exhibit

MANY YEARS AGO, I happened to be part of a small group of National Botanic Gardens students that designed and built a show garden for the RDS garden festival – a humble, more modestly-sized precursor to the modern-day Bloom in the Park ( bloominthepark.com).

The garden turned out to be a gold-medal winning success (our heady claim to fame being that we beat Diarmuid Gavin to first place) but that isn’t my only enduring memory of the event. Truth be told, I’ll never forget what brutally hard work it was; a physically punishing, mentally exhausting, vastly complicated juggling act that our small group carried out with increasing weariness to the ticking clock of an immovable deadline.

Ever since, I’ve had a deep respect for the designers who expertly rise to the challenge year after year – a fine example being the Meath-based landscape architect Jane McCorkell, who is now overseeing the construction of her fifth consecutive show garden for Bloom.

A member of the GLDA ( glda.ie), a judge on the RTÉ Super Garden 2012 series and a graduate of both Writtle College (where she studied Landscape Horticulture) and UCD (she holds a Masters in Landscape Architecture), every one of her previous Bloom show gardens has been a gold medal winner, with McCorkell also taking home the Best in Show Award in 2010. The RHS recently issued an open-ended invitation to McCorkell to exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show – a badge of success for any designer.

McCorkell is both informative and refreshingly candid when discussing what it takes to build a successful show garden, from the importance of securing a sympathetic client and adequate sponsorship to the potential pitfalls of unreliable suppliers, fickle contractors and freakishly bad weather. She mentions her Bloom 2008 garden, when torrential downpours temporarily flooded the Phoenix Park site. “The rain was so heavy and I got so soaked that I had to drive home in my knickers, with my coat over my legs, praying that my car wouldn’t break down on the M50,” she says.

On a more serious note, McCorkell stresses the crucial importance of long-term planning in the design process. “Visitors to Bloom are often very surprised to discover how much time goes into creating a show garden. On average, I’d say that the entire process takes between six to eight months, although we had slightly less time this year. But in an ideal world, it would be great to see designers being given a full 12 months to complete a project.”

Her 2012 sponsor, Bord na Móna, invited McCorkell to come on board in January this year, with work on the initial design beginning almost immediately. McCorkell believes “a designer shouldn’t attempt to build a large show garden for anything under €50,000”. That may sound like a crazy amount of money, but labour costs (carpenters, electricians, contractors; six to eight men sometimes working 16-hour days) can quickly eat up close to a third of that budget, as do hard landscape materials (paving, walls, water features and so on) and planting costs (often 3,000-4,000 plants will be used). There are also many other miscellaneous items to consider (sculpture hire, fittings, furniture, lighting, leaflets, plumbing). She also stresses the importance of listening to the client. “As a landscape architect, it’s vital. In the case of Bord na Móna, the brief was to design a gardener’s garden; an engaging, inviting space that will interest horticulturists of all levels.”

The resulting design is elegantly but unabashedly retro, and quite a departure from most of McCorkell's previous show gardens. The finished garden will include a glasshouse, a potting area and compost bins, while less functional design elements include a graceful bronze sculpture by the Dublin-based artist, Bob Quinn. Similarly, the planting will be quite cottage garden in style, or what McCorkell describes as "a jumble of colour", with most of the plants being sourced from three Irish nurseries, Woodstock, Rentes ( rentes.ie) and Kilmurry ( kilmurrynursery.com).

“Nothing pretentious, but lovely specimen plants like Cornus, ‘Milky Way’, yew cones, the weeping pear, Pyrus pendula, as well as masses of beautiful perennials like lupins, primulas, astrantias, foxgloves, agapanthus and knautias.

Construction is expected to take almost three weeks to complete (her diary contains a spreadsheet which plots the build on a day-by-day basis), and is being carried out by a team of contractors that includes Saxa Landscapes ( saxalandscapes.ie) and project manager, Alan Smith.

McCorkell will do the planting herself. “It can get very pressurised on-site so I like to give myself seven to eight days to comfortably complete it.”

And then? “And then, fingers crossed, a gold medal. Otherwise”, she grins, “ I’ll be completely gutted.”

Jane McCorkell’s Bloom garden

Some of the plants that will feature in Jane McCorkell’s  Bloom 2012 show garden include: Cirsium rivulare atropurpureum, Stipa gigantea, Salvia, ‘Purple Rain’, Campanula punctata, ‘Beetroot’; Agapanthus, ’Dr Brouwer’, Digitalis, ’Primrose Yellow’, Nepeta, ‘Walker’s Low’, Primula beesiana, Lychnis, ’White Robin’, Knautia macedonica, Lupin, ’Chandelier’, Verbena bonariensis, Delphinium, ‘Independence’, Astilbe, ’Diamant’, Alstromeria, ’Andez Vanilla’

DIARY DATES

The Garden and Landscape Designers' Association (GLDA) Bloom Fringe event continues nationwide throughout May, featuring design clinics with Ireland's leading garden designers. See glda.ie.

* The award-winning Cork garden centre, The Secret Garden ( thesecretgardener.com) is holding its Sustainable Garden attraction today from 1pm-5pm. This is a free event offering information and practical demonstrations on making your garden greener and more efficient.

* Also taking place this weekend is Castleknock Community College’s annual plant sale (today and tomorrow, 10am-5pm), at Carpenterstown Road, Dublin 15.

* The Rare Special Plant Fair will take place tomorrow in Beaulieu House in Drogheda, Co Louth. (See rareandspecialplantsfair.com)

* The Wicklow-based botanical artist Holly Somerville is opening her newly-refurbished studio for a series of courses on botanical illustration, beginning May 19th. See hollysomerville.com