GARDENS:The most successful gardens at the Bloom festival showed both imagination and experimentation
BLOOM IS WELL gone by now, but the bank holiday garden festival has left a bunch of images and ideas in my head. An abiding memory, besides the summer heat (two words that we have not been able to place side-by-side for three years) was that despite the vastly reduced budget, the whole event was vibrant and cheerful, with interesting patches of ingenuity.
I’m not a fan of bling in the garden, and there was mercifully little of it this year. And while I don’t usually much care for plastic either, I was pleasantly surprised by the composite decking on Tim Austen’s gold-medal-winning Garden Lounge garden.
The material, made by Irish company Earth-wood (www.earth-wood.com) is a blend of very fine reclaimed sawdust (known as wood flour) and reclaimed and recycled polyethylene in approximately equal proportions.
It doesn’t look exactly like wood, but it doesn’t look unwholesomely artificial either. It’s more expensive than wooden decking, but has greater longevity, is slip resistant, and doesn’t need staining or treating, other than occasional scrubbing or power-washing. It is also more malleable than timber, as was demonstrated in Tim’s garden, where the edging was easily bowed to follow the elegant swoop of the deck’s profile.
There were more acceptable synthetics in the Irish-made planters on Maximilian Kemper’s ECOlogic garden (www.maximizedesign.ie). The simple, rectangular containers, fabricated from dark-grey recycled plastic, are mounted on invisible, industrial-strength castors. These allow you to zoom your vegetation around your patio or balcony, which is especially useful in tight spaces, or – for instance – if you’re going away for a few days and want to move plants into the shade, where they won’t dry out.
Some of the planters had been fitted with two-metre-tall back panels from which hung clever planting pockets – a bit like those fabric shoe organisers – filled with herbs, strawberries, ferns and trailing plants. The pockets are made of polyester felt, sewn with nylon thread, so that they don’t rot, and an irrigation system is required to keep it all watered and fed. It’s a bit fiddly, but an impressive way of greening a wall instantly.
Living walls or “vertical gardens” were popularised by Patrick Blanc, the flamboyant Parisian whose work includes greening the sides of enormous office buildings – something I’d love to see in Dublin. Green walls are one of the ways in which water can be better managed in cities: either by filtering “grey water” (such as the waste from sinks) or by utilising the rainwater that collects on roofs.
Anú Green Designs from Cork city (www.anugreen.ie) demonstrated this and other sustainable technologies in their Ag Cur Báistí garden, with green walls, a living roof, and a “bioswale” – a shallow, planted concavity that filters pollutants from rainwater.
Sustainability was also on the mind of designer Fiann Ó Nuailláin (www.inspiringgardens.ie). His installation, The Great Escape: A Modern Folly, featured a simple grassy mound with oars attached, a surreal joke on how the only way to escape the floods produced by climate change may be to find a patch of higher ground and row away.
Native Irish wildflowers peppered the surface of the miniature landscape. Some, such as the bloody cranesbill (Geranium sanguineum) and the bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta), are becoming rarer in nature because of habitat loss and also (in the case of the bluebell) because of hybridisation with the Spanish bluebell, which has escaped from gardens. All the plants, by the way, are being re-homed in various biodiversity projects in Dublin.
Ó Nuailláin is a designer to watch: his quirky gardens (always project-managed by his partner, Lisa Kelly) are stimulating to both eye and brain, with many layers of meaning waiting to be dug up. Next month sees the Crumlin-based land artist heading to the Royal Horticultural Society’s Tatton Park Show (July 22nd-26th), where he is one of six designers invited to participate in the new “visionary gardens” section. His offering, entitled Levitate Me, will include an elevated earth mound, and will mine a rich seam of Irish archaeology, mythology and culture.
The idea of growing your own food is all over this country like a giant rash. And such a healthy infection it is too, with allotments and vegetable patches breaking out all over the place. Bloom, of course, was no exception: its much publicised White House Garden was greatly admired, as was Paul and Orla Woods’ kitchen garden, with pastel raised beds and chestnut palings.
The Woodses, who own Kilmurry Nursery in Wexford, are accomplished creators of show gardens: this charming effort was for Honest2Goodness, one of the many new providers of allotments in this country. The serviced plots (with free manure, barbecue and picnic facilities, and expert assistance) are on the Dublin-Meath border, near Dunboyne. Plotholders who find themselves with a glut of produce can sell their excess through an associated food market (www.honest2goodness.ie).
Growing your own doesn’t always work out exactly as planned: my several varieties of basil seeds, for example, bought in a flurry of urgency two months ago, are still nestled in their packets. Somehow in the hurly-burly of pricking out, potting on and planting of some dozens of other things, the basil got overlooked. So, I was delighted to find Highfield Nurseries’ ready-to-harvest Living Flavour herbs (www.livingflavour.com). The range – which includes basil, rosemary, parsley, mint, coriander, thyme and oregano – is available in Dunnes Stores and a few garden centres. They are presented in 13cm plastic pots, which is a size up from the usual potted supermarket herb, so they should last longer, if you pick them in a way that respects the plant’s growth habit.
A final salute to Irish enterprise must go to Dr Abdul Al-Amidi and Ciaran Walsh, who launched their SuperNemos bio-insecticide at Bloom. The environmentally friendly product is a cocktail of nematodes to control wireworm, vine weevil, chafer grub, leatherjacket, fungus gnat and a host of other soil-dwelling pests. It has been trialled by Irish nurseries and growers, and is now available to domestic gardeners (www.nemo.ie).jpowers@irishtimes.com
This week's work
Most vegetables demand a lot of moisture, and must be watered, especially if you live on the drier east coast. Never water on a hot, sunny day: not only will much of the moisture evaporate, but plant roots are less receptive when they are very warm. Water early in the morning, or in the evening. If slugs and snails are a problem, morning is better. Mulching is every bit as important as watering, as it retains moisture, keeps weeds down and protects the soil structure. Mulch only when the soil is damp, and use grass clippings (but not if you have treated the lawn for weeds), straw, newspaper or cardboard.