Creativity in full Bloom

The Rehab garden, displaying this weekend at the Bloom festival, is designed to take visitors on a creative journey

THE BLOOM festival in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, this weekend represents the culmination of months of hard work for garden designers, horticulturists, site construction workers and everyone else involved in putting together Ireland’s largest garden and food festival.

Alongside the show gardens and pavilions are a small but significant number of gardens designed to highlight a health condition or those affected by one.

This year, these include the cystic fibrosis garden with 37 steel arches of varying heights representing the constriction and restricted lung capacity of cystic fibrosis sufferers.

Another interesting one is the National Council for the Blind’s sensory garden which includes raised planting, a water feature and an area of tactile prairie-style planting. But, this year’s health garden that has probably involved most people in its design and execution is Rehab’s garden.

The Rehab garden – which is called Changing Perspectives – has been designed by David Shorthall with horticulture students in the National Learning Network in Stillorgan, Co Dublin, regular attendants to a Rehabcare mental health centre in Westland Square, Dublin, and Rehab recycling in Tallaght, Dublin.

Drawing on the skills and resources of each group, the garden invites visitors to take a journey (and change their perspective while doing so) – beyond the graffiti-covered walls, through a wheelchair-accessible sensory tunnel to explore shapes, colours, smells and textures of planted areas beyond.

The involvement of students and service users has been key to its creation.

Eoin Pattison and Noel Mullaney, horticulture students with the National Learning Network, have contributed boxes of plants for a chessboard-like structure within the garden.

“I’ve included potatoes, lettuces, carrots, cabbage and beetroot in my box because they represent the crops that were important when I was growing up in the west of Ireland,” says Mullaney, who is originally from Claremorris, Co Mayo but currently lives in the Simon Community hostel in Seán McDermott Street, Dublin.

“I’ve included onions in my box,” says Pattison, who worked in politics before starting this two-year course in horticulture.

“The idea with the different boxes is that each individual chooses what goes in but by putting them all together, [symbolically] we can achieve more,” says David Shortall, who teaches on the National Learning Network course.

Another horticulture student, John Hammond has been very involved in the design and construction of the tunnel for the garden.

“I worked as a sheet metal worker for 30 years and then was bed bound for two years following an accident at work so, for me, this course has given me a different angle and outlook, following a period of time when there was a void in my life,” he explains.

“The most difficult thing preparing for Bloom has been finding transportation for all the parts of the garden,” he says.

Materials provided for the garden by Rehab recycling aim to change people’s perspective on what we consider to be rubbish. So, for instance, the walls are made from compressed polystyrene and tiny pebbles on the paths are a byproduct from glass recycling.

“The idea of including the walls themselves is that the world can be a darker place before care or that sometimes when you ‘hit a brick wall’, you can’t see a future for yourself,” says Shortall.

Francis Ducie has been one of those creating the art and sculpture pieces for the tunnel in the garden. “I have been painting weeds on cardboard which will be one of the pieces woven through the tunnel with recycled lighting,” he explains.

Ducie says that he goes into the centre almost every day. “I need something to do during the day or I’d get depressed and lonely. I have Asperger’s syndrome and two years ago, two members of my family died so I feel very much on my own,” he says.

Michael O’Connor, the general manager of East and South East Rehabcare, says the garden has brought together lots of different aspects of Rehab.

“There has been a great synergy between the different groups. It has been a good process for many of those involved,” he says.

Plans are already afoot to have the garden relocated to the Rehab headquarters in Roslyn Park, Sandymount, following its showing in Bloom from Thursday to Monday next.

See

[ bloominthepark.com ]

for full details of Bloom garden and food festival in Phoenix Park, Dublin this weekend