Ask a simple question?

I like circles!

Over the last few weeks I have discussed inspiring ideas and how best to implement them. Given the time of year it is a good time to look at planning for next year, careful planning now will pay dividends next year.
One of the points I have referred to on more than one occasions is budget – are we spending enough? But the questions should perhaps be - Are we spending enough on the right things? In essence all we need to create a garden is a few packets of seeds which are of course inexpensive, and a lot of hard work. Where the budget current dilemma comes from is the price we have to pay for an Instant Garden.
It is of course easy for me to say that we should be increasing our budgets, and I have thought a lot about this, I think the real question is the apportionment of that budget. In my experience almost every time I go to look at a garden to design I hear the same things ‘no maintenance’ or ‘low maintenance’ which tends to mean, very few plants and lots of paving. That is of course fine but what does that tell you? It tells me that the people in the house don’t really want a garden, they want the area at the back of the house to look good but they don’t really ever want to go out there!
I know we don’t always have the best weather in the world but a few good weeks a year in your own little oasis is precious and is well worth the effort. Or is it! Lots of questions this week and with good reason, in order to get what we want out of our gardens we have to ask lots of questions as to what we really want. Too many people put too little thought in before they create a garden and then don’t get anything out of it after all their effort.
I think we don’t plan enough and too many people allow themselves to be short changed by their designers or contractors. If you don’t put any effort in to help in the plan why should anyone else. Do this small test: Ask yourself the following five questions and write down the answers,
1. Circles or squares ?
2. Formal or informal?
3. Favourite colour?
4. Old or new?
5. BMW or VW Beetle?
Now go out into your garden and see where your character stamp has been made. If none of your answers are characteristic of the style of your garden it’s probably no wonder you are looking to change it. Your garden as much as your house or clothes has to fit you! If you ask a lot of questions about yourself, your partner and your children the answers will provide you with the blueprint for success.

How to design and create!

Last week I was discussing inspirational ideas, thinking outside the box and attempting to create something extraordinary, special and precious in our gardens, as opposed to settling for the ordinary. I showed a picture of a scrap car last week, I used this car in the creation of a garden recently, the purpose behind the creation was to show, and how even a destructed car could be used to create something useful, beautiful and to be enjoyed.
Some of my peers thought I was off my rocker to be it mildly! And this shows that of course we don’t all think the same and that we all have our own individual styles and aspirations. Creativity is not something that we learn or can be taught, but we can of course learn from our experiences and put these to the task of helping us create. One of the issues that creative people have is that they may have the ideas but they do not posses the ability or experience to see the project through.
To overcome any shortfalls in the entire process it is important to know your own limitations and then seek the help and advice of others to see it through. Garden designers and landscape contractors can be used in the creation process as well as with the physical creation. If you like the physical challenge and have the right skills to do the work but don’t have the design knowledge, designers can be brought into advice on certain parts of the project and they would only charge for their time spent. Their expertise is very valuable and after sorting out all the creative steps you can then get down to the business of actual creation.
On the other hand if you have the design skills and are unable to physically do the work contractors can be brought in to again help in the design and then carry out the work.
The most important element in designing and creating is not to compromise on what you want, to reach for the stars and see the dream through. As we discussed last week this may take a little bit longer than expected or you originally wanted but the rewards are far greater.
There are plenty of great web sites, books and magazines out there to give you inspiration, so good luck!
Diarmuid Gavin has just launched a new magazine “Diarmuid Gavin’s Garden Design” it’s a high quality glossy magazine with plenty to read and admire.

True Vision

This car is inspirational – see how next week!

As all my regular readers will know, I have spent the last two weeks in South Africa building our garden of Hope. The journey for this project has taken approx. 13 months and in this time I have learnt a lot and experienced things I never thought I would. I re-established old friendships and made many new friends and in the process we provided the community of Freedom Park with facilities they could only dream of.
Along this journey I have met many people and notably two who are constantly in the public arena, Niall Mellon for his charity work and Diarmuid Gavin for his curly hair and tufted chest! Both of these men are visionaries, they push away the obstacles to what they want and go straight for it. This is truly inspirational and should be taken a lesson from which everyone can learn.
I find gardening is bit like relationships; the more you put in the more you get out of it. It is of course not that simple but there are many similarities. Plants are certainly like people, the better looking the plant the higher the maintenance, the smaller less attractive plants just manage to get on with it and nobody seems to even notice they exist. Not to mention the grumblers the ones that just never seem to get enough attention, their heads hang because someone’s not there to hold them up. The big difference is that we as people have the know how, the ability, and the tools to make things better but we are all too often too busy to do anything about it.
I have seen first hand that with a little bit of extra effort and creativity we can not only change our own life’s but also the lives of others. I’m not looking for everyone to go off on a charity mission but I think we should start to think a little more outside the box and into the wilderness. The world is spilling over with inspirational people, designing, creating and building things far beyond our imagination, yet when many people seek to build or improve their our homes and gardens they just seem to stick to the norm and settle for what’s on the shelf.
In my professional career I am always trying to push out the boundaries, this is not always possible and I often have to curtail my ideas, more often than not to suit budgets. This is a fact of life or is it? When I think about, it is not really the budget that restricts inspiration it is the budget at that time. You see we all want so much right away that we end up accepting most of what we want within our current budget. What if we just waited, a few extra months or a year to get exactly what we want just a little later? I know that I would be happier! And in truth I think that most of us don’t really what to accept the normal, we all seek to achieve something in our life’s, however it is only with effort and patience that we can achieve this. The rewards however are ten fold; I know that on the few gardens I have created on an open budget, they have been my best, because instead of thinking about money I was thinking of creating.
This is why TV gardeners have become so inspirational, this is why millionaires are so inspirational, they can create and do things that many of us only dream of, but we should realise that they had a journey too. We see them on top of the mountain, but we don’t see them climbing it. This inspiration has both positive and negative effects on our life’s, we are certainly inspired by what we see and then we get down because we can’t afford it!
A garden to me is always a blank canvass, I don’t see hills and valleys, restrictions or obstacles, or even think about how much!, I see an open space where flair and imagination can be used to create a wonderful garden. When I established the Garden of Hope project I had a vision of creating a garden where everyone could meet, greet and play, I spoke at functions and conferences all over Ireland and in South Africa how we would build this garden on a shoestring budget in six days. What I couldn’t speak about until now is how this garden would affect the volunteers who built it or the community who now own it. The volunteers who built it could never have realised its effect and in fact nor did I, but as a group what we did was build on inspiration. If I could inspire one person to create their true vision of a garden my mission would be complete.
Imagine the difference it could make to your life to have something so special that it continues to take your breath away every time you see it, from when you wake up every morning to when you go to bed every night, forever in your thoughts and dreams. For those of us who are lucky enough this is a person. Be inspired by what and who is around you to make your own life and others all that more special.

The garden of Hope is no longer a dream

I have designed and built over a 100 gardens in the last five years and every one of them have been very special to me. However the communal garden I designed for Freedom Park in South Africa is by far the most special and significant piece of work to date.
After 13 months of planning, recruiting, fundraising, writing, and public speaking on Saturday the 3rd of November 2007, 53 volunteers joined me in creating a little piece of Heaven. Nelson Mandela, said in his first address after being elected president of South Africa that the cultivation of earth shall be as close to heaven as one on earth can get. For our team of 54 gardeners we certainly felt that for the people of Freedom Park, our gift to them of a beautiful garden was like giving them a small piece of heaven on their downtrodden earth.
We had six days to complete out task, 800 square metres to cultivate, 200 cubic metres of earth to remove, 220 cubic metres of compost to fill, 200 square metres of paving to lay, 3 play areas to create, seating, lawns, water feature, murals, artwork, mirrors to hang, stepping stones to build, walls to plaster and paint and approx. 1500 plants to plant and build a basketball court in our spare time. Truly a mammoth task, however through sheer determination, early mornings, late evenings and plenty of elbow grease, the Garden of Hope team completed the garden and basketball court just before 12pm on Friday 9th November. 30 minutes later Niall Mellon officially handed over the 203 houses built in the previous week, the community hall and garden and of course the basketball court. Thousands were in attendance including all of the volunteers, the house and community beneficiaries and local government officials, as well as sponsors and world press.
The atmosphere was electrifying as everyone assembled at the climax of a gruelling week, as expected not everything went to plan, but everything was completed in the end and when 1380 volunteers left Freedom Park on Friday afternoon, one thing was for sure, Irish people had changed the life’s of that entire community for the better.
All the press clippings in the world, the group photographs, the handshakes or the praise received from my peers could give me anymore satisfaction than when I went back to Freedom Park on Saturday morning, I brought a group of 6 local children into the garden and watched them as they played, initially they where hesitant to touch anything and needed to get the reassurance that indeed this garden was theirs. Myself and a local taxi driver who had brought me to the site sat on the exterior wall and cried, tears of joy for a magical moment like few others was unfolding in front of us. In proportion to the benefit the sacrifice is nothing.
The Garden of Hope project has now commenced for 2008, please join us or support us on our way.

Garden of Hope Project 2007

Freedom Park Site Overview of plan

Dominic Loughran is a Belfast born garden designer and gardening columnist. He approached the Niall Mellon Townships Initiative with the idea to build a Communal garden in conjunction with their house building project for 2007. The Niall Mellon Townships Trust is a house-building charity building houses for people whom are currently living in shacks in Cape Town, South Africa.It is hoped that the garden will become the central meeting point for the community, a place to play, meet, contemplate and enjoy the surroundings. The garden will be built on a designated site in Freedom Park, Cape Town on approx. 800 square metres . The plan includes;
A 160 square metre community hall
A gable wall (Direct replica of Free Derry Corner) – Murals to be painted on back and front of gable
120 linear metres of walled seating, the walls of the seats
2 spherical hanging steel garden seats
5 play areas including, swings slides and climbing frames
5 patio areas
A double sided mirror image of Africa as central feature standing 2.5 metres high
A central water feature
Concrete archways over pathways
Path ways using giant stepping stones
A vast array of mature, semi mature and young plants, shrubs and climbers
60 volunteers will build the garden in one week from the 2 nd to the 10 th of November 2007; each volunteer must raise at least €4,000 to participate in the project. This is a very ambitious project, the volunteers will be working from early in the morning until late into the evening to achieve our goal and finish on time.
We need your help to raise sufficient funds to complete this challenge, all contributions are welcome. Please give generously; all cheques should be made payable to the ‘Niall Mellon Trust’, and sent to either address below.
Garden of Hope Project, 54 Horn Drive, Belfast BT11 9NF
Garden of Hope Project 2 Earlsfort Glade,Lucan, Co. Dublin.
Phone: 00353-1-6249612, Mobile: 00353-87-2854602,
or email: info@dreamgardens.ie
Web: http://www.dreamgardens.ie/

Lighting

I just got home from work, its 7.10pm and it’s dark, if you’re like me you’ll get your dinner and then perhaps get a chance to get out into the back garden for a cuppa and a ciggy! I have plenty of lights in my own garden and therefore its easy for me to find my way around, but if you have not yet invested in a good lighting system now is a great time to get cracking!
You get two gardens for the price of one with a good lighting system. Many of our gardens have plenty of day time clutter, kids bikes, swings – those awful trampolines and the dreaded washing line! A lighting system can shadow off these areas and highlight the better parts of our gardens, giving light to the entertaining areas and masking off the unwanted areas. Cleaver lighting is an essential ingredient in a well designed garden and the variety of lighting available today is stunning.
A good lighting plan is vital to getting it all right. Testing the scheme at night, moving highlights and introducing shadow areas will make your garden a haven at night. Motion sensor spot lights are not what we are talking about here, garden lighting should be elegant and graceful it should highlight the best areas and shadow the others. Your underwear may be very fancy, but you don’t want to put a spot light underneath it to show it off at night!

There are three main categories of lighting,

Mains lighting
Low voltage lighting
Solar powered lighting

Mains lighting is of course the biggest and brightest of the bunch, it must be installed and commissioned by an expert, it not the sort of stuff you want to mess up over a weekend project. Mains lighting connected through dimmer junctions can be used to vary the output of lights and this is a great feature to have. The ability to dim all or individual lights is a very nice feature to your lighting display. Junction boxes are widely available for outdoor use with dimmer capabilities and are also available with remote control. Safety is paramount and suitable cable and trip switches must be used. Mains lights are usually the most expensive of the group, as there lighting capabilities require better construction and safety standards.

Low voltage lights are easy to install, very economical to buy and also to use. Again installation by an expert is advisable. In this category you’ll find all sorts of lights available, spotlights, path lights, strip lights and down lights. The lighting industry as a whole has really made the effort to make this range user friendly and attractive. The introduction of LED’s has again widened the market and the range of LED lights is fantastic. LED are particularly useful as spot lights they give a great amount of light as compared to their use of power. There is also a great range of lights available that can be inserted into decks and patio’s, walls and also mounted lights.

Solar lights are certainly becoming more popular and I would love to say that they could be used solely in a scheme but to date they just haven’t come up to the mark in output. They can of course be used as a permanent lighting source which compliments the other two groups. They are very easy to install good value and have zero running costs. I would imagine that over the next few years solar lights will get even better, the advantage of having no cables is fantastic as it reduces safety requirements, it means that anyone can install them and they are also easy to move around to change scheme if required.

You should be able to find a few bargains as most of the big stores are clearing out for Christmas stock. You should seek advice from the stores and always read the instructions carefully. Good luck – Lights action!

Vine Weevil

Vine Weevil – Aren’t they pretty!

Vine weevil (Otiorhynchus sulcatus)

I’ve noticed over the last few weeks in particular vine weevils on the back wall of my house. Over this period I have counted 20 or so and this is quite unusual. They say if you see one there are thousands of others around the same area. On close inspection around the garden I have noticed their presence; many of the shrubs have evidence of this little pest.
They are certainly not a pretty pest, they come from the beetle family, and they are about 9mm long, dull black with pear shaped bodies and have long distinctive noses. Even the name is a bit creepy!
Adult weevils do cause leaf damage but they do not normally effect the plants growth. Weevils cannot fly but they are prolific climbers and this is where if I run into them in past weeks. They in fact move quite slowly so they are easy to catch and place elsewhere. Vine weevils attack a wide range of plants with tough waxy leaves, such as laurel, bay, Viburnum, ornamental ivy, and of course, grape vines.
Adults eat notches out of the sides of the leaves; the soil-living larvae can kill pot plants by biting the roots off below the surface.
It’s not the adult that we must be careful of its their young! Vine weevil grubs attack plants growing in pots or other containers, out of doors or under cover, can be severely affected by vine weevil grubs. Plants growing in the open ground are less likely to be damaged, although the grubs sometimes kill strawberries, primulas, polyanthus, Sedum, Heuchera and young yew plants.
The adult weevils feed on the foliage of many herbaceous plants and shrubs, especially Rhododendron, evergreen Euonymus, Hydrangea, Epimedium, Bergenia, Primula and strawberry.

Gardener's plans for barrack site

Landscape gardener and Andersonstown News columnist Dominic Loughran has come up with a plan to transform the former Andersonstown Barracks site into a tranquil oasis.Dominic, from Andersonstown, proposes to create a garden and introduce a tower of reflection to replace the watchtower, which was previously on the site.The Department for Social Development’s (DSD) decision to hand over the site for the development of apartments has been met with strong opposition by local residents.Dominic’s plans show the entrance to the garden as a large patio area in the shape of a footprint – he says it’s a dual symbol of a giant step – a step in faith by the communities of Ireland and a step of the mythical Finn MacCool. To get to the main area, visitors must cross water over a small timber bridge. The water runs all around the watchtower, meeting a water fountain to the rear of the garden. The water fountain is surrounded by preformed columns inspired by the Giant’s Causeway.The central feature of the garden is that watchtower but unlike the baleful security tower which rose over local homes, the cedar-clad watchtower has a stainless steel column and glass-bordered staircase and deck. The stainless steel column is reflective and from any angle on the main deck of the watchtower visitors would be able to see a reflection of the city landscape. The staircase leads to a main decking area above; the main deck would have a selection of seating and table arrangements. “The proposal is made with the intention of bringing an area of beauty to the community, increasing nature through wildlife, introducing the landscape to visitors and as a place to look forward to the future without forgetting our past,” said Dominic.Dominic’s proposal has been submitted to the West Belfast Partnership Board.Meanwhile, residents and their supporters will hold a ‘Reclaim Our Site Festival’ this Sunday to reclaim community ownership of the former Andersonstown Barracks site and to express their opposition to the DSD’s decision to hand over the iconic public space for private development. Residents feel strongly that, after enduring the presence of an RUC barracks for more than 35 years, the community should have had a full say in determining the future of the site.
ApartmentsThe Stop the Sell-Off Campaign (SSOC) has called for a new, inclusive and binding public consultation. Two weeks ago, SSOC handed in a petition signed by more than 1,000 local residents demanding that the site be kept public and used for the benefit of the community rather than handed over for the construction of apartments, as the plan approved by the DSD proposes. “The DSD decision is typical of the way ‘regeneration’ works in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland, where a handful of private developers have more say in key decisions being made about our future than whole communities do,” said Brian Kelly of SSOC.“The DSD plan for the former barracks site is the most obscene example of a trend that is affecting people right across every community in Belfast and beyond,” he added.The Festival will run from 12 noon to 4pm, and will include music and entertainment for all ages. Award-winning West Belfast hip-hop team Rapture Crew have been invited to perform. Traditional musicians from the Andersonstown School of Music will also entertain the crowd, along with the bands Bréag, Tin Pot Operation and Cruncher. There will be bouncy castles, face-painting and games for children. The Festival was formerly scheduled for September 15 but was postponed after the murder of Harry Holland, who was a strong supporter of the campaign. Organisers will also honour Harry’s legacy as part of the day’s festivities. l The West Belfast Partnership Board are hosting a consultative forum and anyone who has any ideas for the site can contact Gerry McConville or the West Belfast Partnership Board office, Falls Road, on 90 809202.
28/09/2007