As the centrepiece of Bord Bia’s Bloom, the show gardens require a huge commitment in terms of time and energy. Although the process officially starts in September preparing application documents, it actually starts in advance of the previous show, where dialog with potential designers and sponsors begins for the following year. There are numerous calls, emails, and meetings over the summer months and we try to hit the ground running come September.
Once again this year’s festival will boast a great selection of gardens. Amongst them are Alan Rudden’s ‘Urban Retreat’, John Durston’s ‘Nature’s Resurgence’, Teagasc and Pieta House’s ‘Garden of Hope’, and Dara O’Daly at Dublin City Council’s ‘A liveable City’. James Purdy has designed ‘Kaleidoscope of Colour’ for Cuprinol, there is ‘Everyone has a Dream’ by Leonie Cornelius at Woodies, ‘Transition’ by Liat and Oliver Schurmann, and a group of designers from Dublin’s Chocolate Factory is collaborating on a garden titled ‘The Spaces Between’.
As preparation ramps up, our show garden designers are starting to get to grips with the details of their gardens. This year, to highlight the work our designers do leading up to the festival, we have decided to give Horticulture Connected readers an insight into the process by previewing the journeys of Tünde Szentesi, Kevin Dennis, and Brian Burke. Taking a moment’s breath from their planning, the three designers give us the inside track on their personal preparations for Bloom 2017.
If you are interested in designing or sponsoring a garden at Bloom 2018 please get in touch and I will be happy to discuss the process in more detail.
MY JOURNEY TO BLOOM 2017: 
TÜNDE SZENTESI
My journey to Bloom started back in October or November, as it does every year. My original intention was to continue the narrative I started last year with the garden I designed for The Marie Keating Foundation – ‘Out the other side: A Garden of Hope’ – which aimed to raise awareness of breast cancer. This time though, I want to focus on issues surrounding men’s cancer.
While developing the early concepts for my garden, Bord Bia issued expressions of interest from a number of sponsors as they do each year. I was inspired by one in particular and decided to put pen to paper and prepare proposals.
Agri Aware is a charitable trust whose aim is to educate and spread awareness of Irish farming and the agri-food industry. I was excited at the prospect of conceptualising and communicating the messages of such an organisation: the importance of the agri-food industry to both the Irish public and the farming community, the topic of sustainable practices in farming, and the story of modern agriculture and food, from farm to fork.
Whilst still working on designs for my own men’s cancer garden, I researched the subject, prepared my concept proposals and submitted them to Bloom and Agri Aware. I worked hard to develop proposals that would effectively deliver my sponsor’s message ‘Farm to Fork’, and to my delight, was shortlisted and invited to pitch my ideas in person.
In preparing for the interview I developed a sketch design and fabricated a physical model. I find this is a very helpful process. Building a model prompts me to start thinking about the spatial arrangement and scale of my design, potential construction issues, and even how I might go about detailing certain elements later on in the process.
The interview went well and I was over the moon when I heard that Agri Aware liked my proposals and had selected me to represent them at Bloom. It was at this point that I halted work on my men’s cancer garden so I could focus on Agri Aware.
My sponsor and I are currently refining the brief and I am busy developing details, sourcing materials and having initial meetings with my ever dependable contractor, SAXA Landscapes.
For me, plants are key to the success of a show garden and I am always keen to bring new and forgotten plants into my garden. In recent years I have worked closely with Gardenworld Nursery, Nightpark Nursery, and Yellow Furze Nursery to have the stock ‘show garden-ready’ just in time for the June bank holiday.
My construction schedule is almost ready and I am looking forward to the challenge of building on the success of my previous Bloom gardens: ‘Out the other side: A Garden of Hope’ (2016), Water in the Air (2015), and Eco Tango Garden (2013).
TUNDELANDSCAPES
tundelandscapes@gmail.com
CREATING AN OASIS IN THE PARK:
KEVIN DENNIS
Bloom is the largest and most vibrant garden event in Ireland. It celebrates the appreciation of garden design and horticulture while creating a fun and relaxed atmosphere. Garden enthusiasts from all around Ireland flock to Bloom to look for inspiration and to spot new trends. Each year it showcases talent from all around Ireland with contrasting styles of design and planting combinations. I have been keen to return and create a garden at Bloom, and 2017 feels like the right time.
This year I will be creating a show garden for my sponsor Santa Rita. Santa Rita is one of Chile’s oldest and most enterprising wine producers. The Chilean wine was launched
in Ireland in 1989 and regards Ireland as one of it’s most important international markets.
Bloom organisers issued an expression of interest from The Santa Rita to apply with a sketch proposal and design brief for consideration for their 2017 show garden. I was lucky enough to be shortlisted, which gave me the opportunity to meet before the panel and present my design proposals in response to their brief. Thankfully it went my way and it is now time to put the project together. I am working closely with the Santa Rita team to develop design details.
The Santa Rita and Cityscape brands will come together to celebrate today’s lifestyle and moments to be cherished and enjoyed. The garden is entitled ‘Living Oasis’, which celebrates that oasis moment that we look for in our lives, and here it is found through the medium of plants, water and the clean lines of contemporary design.
By definition, we all see an oasis as a fertile green area in a desert but it can be an oasis of calm in the hectic lifestyle of living in a city. Any outdoor space can become a retreat or a place to hide away in, to take a deep breath and unwind. The mental and physical health benefits of gardening have been proven to improve our quality of life.
As a fan of city garden spaces, I like to explore how we can use horticulture and design to create spaces that are a point of gravity in our lives to take time out and reconnect with nature. This garden will be an exaggeration of the oasis theme to highlight what we can achieve in any garden.
The ‘Living Oasis’ garden will have a planting scheme combining exotic and native plants and trees to create a mainly green-themed garden. I am focusing on the texture of the foliage, blending from coarse textures such Astilboides tabularis to the fine textures of Deschampsia ‘Bronze Veil’. By blending green tones and textures to create an interesting
palette of plants I hope to achieve a garden that has a primitive feel with an exotic look. Flowering colours will be used to add some heat to the space with yellow, orange and red splashes and white in areas for some calm and distance. There will be trailing plants on some of the hard structures which will give the effect of plants dripping and overflowing,
softening the rigid clean lines.
This show garden will be unconventional in its use as there will be no main walkway through the space. The entrance to the open garden pavilion, seated space will be through a hidden entrance to the rear of the garden, leaving the element of surprise to the invited visitor.
I am looking forward to the challenge a show garden always brings and to the knowledge acquired through researching this project.
CITYSCAPE GARDENER
info@cityscapegardener.ie
www.cityscapegardener.ie
ON CLOUD CANINE IN BLOOM:
BRIAN BURKE
I am involved, with a group of local volunteers, in the restoration of a neglected, abandoned and derelict famine graveyard in Athy in Co Kildare. Before Christmas, it dawned on me that the project could potentially be a great show garden at Bloom 2017. I thought it had a lot to say about the neglect of entire chapters of our history and how selective we are about the strands of our heritage that we deem to be worthy of commemorating. While the garden was certainly possible, I felt the resplendent setting of Bloom might compromise the solemn message. The depths of winter would probably be more appropriate.
Around the time that I resigned myself to forgetting about the famine garden, the email inviting design submissions arrived. Of the four that I saw I submitted proposals for two. The temptation is to take a blanket bomb approach and apply for several gardens but I relented, realising that I needed to adopt a more pragmatic, surgical approach. I’m glad I did. With a busy day job and a tribe of kids, the time simply does not exist to run with a
blunderbuss strategy.
So, I focused on the two that enthused me most. I submitted a quite hastily prepared proposal for Santa Rita which came to nothing. I didn’t invest too much time on it so was not overly disappointed or surprised that it made no headway.
It was when I saw the invitation from Dogs Trust that I knew the direction in which to point my energy. I instantly recognised the potential to incorporate stimulation and entertainment for the dog into a dynamic family garden. My intention was clear – not a dog’s garden, not a family garden, but both.
I submitted the initial concept for Dogs Trust which I knew was strong enough to hold attention. When Kerrie called to say that they wanted to sit down with me I put everything else on hold to create the space to develop my ideas through solid research. I arrived at the meeting well prepared and armed with a clear vision in my head and on paper.
Having your ideas precisely set out on paper is vital for clients. You might be well able to articulate verbally, but leaving something concise and coherent for their review and
deliberation afterward is critical.
There is an important point here: there was not much time between the call and the meeting. Bloom is all about compressed schedules, about doing a lot in a short space of time, about not whinging and just knuckling down and producing. So here was the entire process in miniature; produce under pressure. What faith would a potential sponsor have in a designer who shows up ill prepared for a meeting like that? It’s your first test.
It may seem curious that I chose to pursue a client seeking design submissions rather than simply going about it myself. Well, the answer is that I recognise the opportunity that the canvass route represents. It’s a ready-made, fully engaged and motivated sponsor, and success means that you circumvent so much of the onerous and objectionable the process of looking for money. Being pitch prepared requires a bit of work but it makes a world of sense to do everything you can to get on board, particularly when you deem the alliance
to be a good fit, which in this case I certainly did.
I was determined that the lessons I have learned over the last two years be incorporated into the approach to this year’s show. Securing a client in advance of Christmas is a crucial
part of that master plan. Unlike previous years, conversations with plant suppliers are well advanced and the trickier aspects of the build are already being fine-tuned by my…eh,
technical team (Paddy). We have also already had a series of productive meetings with the clients, feedback from which has been incorporated directly into the design.
But don’t forget that support and feedback can work both ways. My experience has greatly helped my sponsor to understand how they can best prepare for the event with volunteers, logistics, media and the general approach to the weekend. This is valuable knowledge accumulated from observing these things in previous years.
Designers with experience of the show have extensive insight and input on these decisions that translate to positive exposure and feedback for the sponsor. It’s not knowledge that I would have been conscious of having or if I did, would probably not have placed much value on it but, you know what? It’s there and it’s pivotal to a sponsor in getting results.
So, yet again all roads lead to the Park for our annual stamina/endurance/stress test. Eventually, when I am old and decrepit and strumming a banjo in a rocking chair on my front porch I will try to analyse and understand the unquenchable compulsion that makes a person go through such physical and mental anguish on an annual basis. Someday. There is probably a deep-rooted, underlying psychological phenomenon at play but, for now, it’s just because there is nowhere else on earth any of us would rather be that weekend. And that’s good enough for me.
BRIAN BURKE GARDENS
brian@brianburkegardens.coms ✽
