Peter Donegan will return to the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show 2024 (MIFGS) to design his second show garden there since winning Gold medal April 2023.
The Irish Garden Designer will again team up with Melbourne-based landscape contractor Semken Landscaping.
The Southern Hemispheres largest and most prestigious flower show is hosted at the UNESCO world heritage Royal Exhibition Building Carlton Garden and opens Wednesday March 20th to Sunday 24th2024.
The featured show garden, A Moment in Time – Presented by Daisy’s Garden Supplies, is the story of a veteran Air Force pilot who returns to a place he hoped to be able to recall home and remains as if he had never left.
The design aims to show what is when there is no headstone to one who has not fallen and, though a body is not lost, there remains a mind that can never be the same as it was prior.
The garden features a fragmented path winding to an aged, grassed roof wood cabin and a Piper PA-28 Cherokee plane, the project that once was a wished for return to flight of a then younger man, not complete in its repair or trajectory stalled by tree growth over time, stimulated only by the turbulence of what comes with the witness of conflict.
Set in South-Eastern Australia in the early 1980’s, the garden intends to highlight the difficulties some veterans may face when returning to their former lives or when trying to create a new path post-service in the Air Force.
About Peter Donegan
2023 Peter Donegan became the first Irish landscape architect invited and accepted to design at Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest and most prestigious flower show where he won Gold medal.
Peter returns to MIFGS and Australia as a garden judge and to design the shows featured garden March 2024.
Selected to represent Ireland to design & realise the WW1 Centenary Peace Garden at Château de Péronne in 2018, Peter returned in 2022 and designed a 2nd inaugurated garden at the 13th Century castle known also as the Historial de la Grande Guerre, home to Europe’s largest war museum.
From 2019 to 2022, The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) silver medallist assumed the role of series garden designer for Ireland’s most-watched TV show, RTE’s DIY SOS The Big Build.
In 2001, aged 24, horticulturist Donegan began designing under his own name and swiftly won a host of awards for 17th & 18th-century gardens designed & show gardens at national competition.
Peter Donegan MSGD is a registered member of The Society of Garden Designers (UK), has been a garden judge in London and Melbourne and an international guest speaker, master of ceremonies and garden design lecturer
