Diarmuid Gavin: Diarmuid’s going native and wild in the garden

Award-winning garden designer and TV presenter Diarmuid Gavin sums up spring in succinct terms for gardeners: “It’s just exhilarating.

“I’m looking out at my front garden, and the Narcissi are coming up, and everything is starting to grow. We’ve had a very stormy but relatively mild winter, so things are really ready to shoot,” he says, with clear exuberance in his voice from his home in Kilmacanogue, Co Wicklow.

“It’s hugely exciting. In my own garden, it means that it is beginning to mature, and there will be a massive burst in the next month.”

So how would he describe his own garden? “It’s a jungle,” he says, chuckling with laughter. “I love the sub-tropical look, so it’s a kind of an evergreen oasis with huge ferns and any amount of trees in a relatively small area.”

While Diarmuid admits it’s a bit “messy” at the minute, in a few weeks it will burst into life and colour. “It’s a very exciting garden to have. It’s my retreat. I have really enjoyed making and planting this one,” says the gardening personality as the growing season gets into gear.

Aged just five, his first gardening memory was watching his dad and uncle build their first garden in Dublin’s Rathfarnham, where he grew up.

“I would have been in the top room of the house looking through the net curtains, and I was amazed at the process – clearing away the builder’s rubble, raking everything out, and doing the landscaping themselves.

“Then sowing the seeds and planting the same as everyone else on the road —cherry trees and the little borders of bedding plants around the edges [of the front garden]. Uncle Chris came with hydrangea cuttings from his own garden and then established them.

“The rest of my memories growing up were being sent out to look after the garden, which I hated, weeding borders,” he quips. When it is suggested that this might be unusual for a gardening expert, Diarmuid qualifies it by saying, “It was really conformist gardening; nothing particularly creative about it. And that really bugged me.”

However, nearby Bushy Park was much more to his liking with an “amazing woodland” full of magical plants, which seemed like “a place of endless adventure” to his younger self.

“I liked the wilder stuff more than the very suburban that I was surrounded by,” he remembers.

With a great interest in design, pop culture and architecture in his youth, he recalls seeing an Italian garden installation being put together on the BBC’s legendary kids show Blue Peter, which had a massive impact on him.

“Even though an Italian garden would have been a classical type of garden, I really loved this idea [of creating a garden from scratch].”

All of this led him to pursue garden design as a career along with his desire to destroy the suburban garden as a style.

“The excitement of design and the new wave of all those pop videos with David Bowie [came together]. I mixed ideas that people weren’t mixing at the time. So I knew early on that I wanted to create gardens, but I wanted to create gardens that were different.”

Fresh approach

After school he worked for several years in Mackey Seeds, the legendary shop in Mary Street, before training for three years in the National Botanic Gardens.

He then set off to make his dream of coming up with “gardens that were different” a reality. It was a difficult ask when no one else was doing it at the time though, he concedes.

Luckily, Diarmuid says he found that he “could create gardens easily, and I had a natural aptitude for setting out a garden and plans”.

The late Terry Keane, the famous columnist who would later become his mother-in-law, was an early champion of his fresh approach to gardens and his dream, as was her daughter Justine.

After designing Terry’s garden, she approached others to support Diarmuid. Aside from that, though, he admits that it was a “lonely old road” because he was essentially ploughing a new furrow.

“I came across a book called Paradise Transformed: Private Gardens for the Twenty-First Century, and that had a huge effect on me because that showed me there were people in different parts of the world doing stuff that was different. That really excited me, and it gave me an energy boost I needed to just keep going.”

After some very tough years when he contemplated leaving the industry, he gave himself a final year to make a go of it. Luckily, TV work and designing gardens for the Chelsea Flower Show turned the tide for him at a time when, he says, people were more open to change.

He won a gold medal for his garden at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show in London in 2011 and has been lauded there many times since for his creations.

Despite his success, that drive to be unique has not left him. “I have gardens that I still want to build, and I never feel very far away from the early days of wanting to be out there, to push boundaries and say things in gardens to explore different emotions,” he says.

One of those is a “dystopian garden” he had intended to create for the Chelsea Flower Show the year COVID-19 struck. The idea behind this is “something huge and intimidating”, he explains.

While based on a traditional idea, it would be completely reinvented so that people would see beauty in something that initially appears horrible.

Electrifying

While Diarmuid is not interested in the competitive element, he believes Chelsea does give you “an auditorium” to show your creativity.

“It gives you an audience. It gives you a place that is quite electrifying. It gives you plenty of attention, good or bad, so you have to put everything into it.”

Looking ahead to the next few months, he will be back on our television screens designing gardens for Garden Rescue on BBC 1. There’s also a first appearance at Bloom in the Phoenix Park from 29 May to 2 June to look forward to, and an appearance at the Festival of Nature and Gardens in Ballytubbert, Stradbally Co Laois on 3 to 4 May.

In between, he will be doing plenty of bespoke online garden design consultations for clients, which he says have been a “revelation” since he started doing them on Zoom last October.

It is all to do with being more in touch with nature, eating outside, and regarding your garden as another room in your house to enjoy

“It allows me to [virtually] visit people from all around the country and beyond for an hour and get to know them and their gardens before sending on a report on what I recommend,” the celebrity gardener says, adding that people are now looking for a looser look focused more on colour and nature.

He identifies this as part of a continued shift towards promoting wildlife and biodiversity in green spaces and a move to using fewer chemicals.

“The trends really would be the move towards working with nature rather than against it. That means using a lot of native plants, sowing native wildflower meadows, and looking at trees and shrubs that have originated in this country because all of these things will be hugely beneficial for the wildlife around us,” Diarmuid says.

Householders are increasingly seeing the garden as an extension of their home. As a result, many are taking a Nordic approach to wellness in the garden by bringing in saunas and hot tubs.

“It is all to do with being more in touch with nature, eating outside, and regarding your garden as another room in your house to enjoy.”

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