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THE TENTH ANNUAL Bloom festival is happening this weekend in the Phoenix Park in Dublin.
There’s a wide range of imaginative designs on display – from tributes to the children who died in 1916 to Chinese temple gardens.
Between them, the Bloom designers have hundreds of years of experience in creating and maintaining their gardens. They’ve been working hard for the past three weeks to get their offerings ready in time to be judged and viewed by the public.
So… Want to get your garden in shape for the summer months, but don’t know where to start?
TheJournal.ie spoke to just a few of the designers at Bloom to get their top tips for gardening at home.
The award-winning Brian Burke designed GOAL’s Damascus Courtyard War and Peace Garden at Bloom this year.
He knows a thing or two about show gardens and exhibits and said people shouldn’t try to create what they see at festivals like Bloom:
There’s an imperative in the show garden setting that you plant very densely, that you create density, that you create quantity and you create lushness, people often make the mistake of trying to recreate that at home.
Instead of copying what you see, his top tip is to give your trees and plants room to breathe in your garden:
At home you need to give plants a bit more breathing space.
Fiann Ó Nualláin has plenty of experience at Bloom having participated in all ten of the festivals.
He has designed 19 gardens altogether for the annual event and this year one of his creations is all about 1916 and the children who died during the Rising.
His advice is to wear suncream while gardening, but along with that he also gave some unexpected dietary advice:
Eat more tomatoes, because tomatoes have lycopene contained in them and the more lycopene you ingest into your body, the more melanin you get, and melanin makes you tan, not burn.
The youngest ever participant at Bloom, Sofi Dosa, believes the most important thing is to be organised in your garden, and plan everything beforehand.
She said:
My top tip, organisation, that’s always number one, and planning, planning, plan yeah plan.
So. Yes… That’s you told.
Alan Rudden, designer of the Santa Rita Living la Vida 120 Garden at this year’s festival, has several Bloom medals to his name to date.
The long time competitor gave a simple tip of keeping your garden neat and tidy, which everyone can follow at home:
Paint your boundary walls and keep your grass verges clipped and clean look.
One of the most relaxing spaces at Bloom is the Savills Face to Face garden, which is meant to encourage conversation rather than living your life through a smartphone.
The designer, Andrew Christopher Dunne, believes the number one thing any gardener should do is enjoy their surroundings.
It doesn’t matter what you do or how good your garden is, enjoy it.
Bloom is on between now and Monday, for more information about tickets click here.
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Having an issue whatsoever with FFG will be outlawed eventually. When they are finished with the high fives and congratulating one another on being incredible, what are they doing to help the 4000 homeless children in the country? Probably just ban non government media on reporting on it.
The opposition voices are serial objectors to housing developments; champagne socialists. If they are upset then this indicates the bill aims to make it much easier to bypass the cranks in order to get housing built. I support the guillotine consequently.
@Lewis Armstrong: As far as I can see, those opposition you refer to object to developments that would hand our housing over to vampire funds.
I presume therefore you are in favour of such government policy.
@Lewis Armstrong: what protections will be included to stop the government purposely delaying all debates and discussions to begin with so they can just guillotine anything they want.
“There is a housing emergency and crisis,” said Harris. ” – the cheek of a FFG to utter that sentence!
Is it the same bill that has had over 1,100 amendments made to it and half of those are by the Housing Minister himself.
Is it the same bill that says an Bord Pleanala have to pay fines if they don’t complete a planning application in a set number of weeks.
Harris says it had a 120 hours of debate and therefore meets the threshold and can be guillotined but it sounds like the 1,100 changes would have taken much of that time, maybe that was the plan all along when they obviously published shoddy policy.
@Lewis Armstrong: True. SFs double speak in particular crying out for more housing while blocking developments all over the place was part of what turned me off voting for them. They points score at every opportunity rather than focussing on the task at hand. It’s irritating.
@Lewis Armstrong: No serious objectors, we have laws in place for a reason to keep governments in check.
Neo liberal agendas favour the rich. Opposition is there to object to bad planning. I drive a lot and see plenty of new build, mostly apartments, lying empty for months.build to rent. Is that what we want in Ireland, faceless builders, reaping profits, money going out of the country to global entities.
Or homes, people can be proud of, not ending up ghost estates, where crime is rampant.
Thought we had moved on from those days.
As a person who was involved in building thousands of homes , with in a few weeks after Nonnan and fg created the legislation to allow individuals to buy all houses and pay no social tax ,everything changing, and yet more then half the people that just voted, think that’s OK,
have your say