Bloom has just finished its five day run of plants, gardens and food in the Phoenix Park Dublin. With approximately 100,000 visitors even the mixed weather could not turn visitors away from heading along to the park to get some garden inspiration from some of Ireland’s top designers.
Bloom 2015 proved a very good year for Kildare Designers. Kieran Dunne of Kildare Growers along with Anthony Ryan won a Gold medal for their Crumlin Childrens Hospital garden. This was the first gold for Kieran Dunne who has had a garden at every Bloom since it was founded.
While Ruth Liddle won a silver gilt medal for her Sculpture Garden which was designed with Ingrid Swan. Ruth’s garden was the perfect mix of functional art gallery and impressive show garden. And being one of the few gardens you would walk through proved very popular with visitors.
Up Cycling proved to be a key trend for 2015 with a lot of gardens using reclaimed materials in some form or an other. Breffni x made an entire room or ‘brewery’ from reclaimed materials and it could happily sit in any garden around the country.
Both gold medalist Joan Mallon and also silver and gold medalist Fiann O’Nuallain repurposed corrugated steal for raised beds and building walls in Joan’s case. While Joan’s garden was a conceptual garden and not many people will be building walls from it both gardens showed visitors just how versatile the material can be in a garden.
Foxgloves were a flower which made a couple of appearances at Bloom this year but Jane McCorkells garden which won gold and Best in Show had the most impressive use of them. Her creamish white foxgloves worked fantastically against all the stone in her garden. Foxgloves are a flower which can easily be worked into any planting scheme.
Cottage style planting proved extremely popular again this year. Fiann O’Nuallain’s Irish Country Magazine Garden offered visitors a perfect example of cottage planting and urban up cycling. Within this themes of planting lupins proved to be extremely popular in show gardens this year. And as lupins come in such a wide range of colours it means that gardeners can find one that will work very well in any garden.
My Name is David Corscadden and I have just finished my degree in horticulture from UCD. I have a keen interest in wildlife friendly gardens or as I like to call them “Wild Gardens”. I have in the last year taken a u-turn in what I thought I would do after college. I have moved more in to the literature side of horticulture and plan to do a masters in journalism next year.
Source: Beyond the Wild Garden – Bloom Show Garden Highlights – David Corscadden
