You don’t have to be very naughty to be the enfant terrible of
gardening, but Diarmuid Gavin was that wild child – the Damien Hirst of the
shrubbery, Jamie Oliver with a trowel. He’s 43 now, so not much of an enfant
any more. And, as it turns out, he’s not so terrible, either.
True, he arrives at his studio in west London, in a T-shirt and worn, baggy
jeans. But looking down at us from a shelf are two Christmas cards from the
Blairs. And next to them is a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh shaking hands
with a tousled-haired figure who must be Gavin, only he’s dressed in a suit.
Perhaps the strongest sign of Gavin’s new-found maturity is the garden he has
created for this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which begins on Tuesday. It
has none of the “shark fins in suburban gardens” stuff of his time on Home
Front, the popular BBC television programme he co-fronted with Laurence
Llwelyn-Bowen until last year; none of the lottery balls that featured in
his Chelsea 2004 design; and no concrete bits, either. It’s a space in which
an affluent older couple can potter about or sit and, as Gavin puts it,
listen to Joni Mitchell. Anarchy in the UK it is not.
“This is very much On Golden Pond,” says Gavin, looking over the plans.
“Sitting having a glass of wine and mellowing away. I think it possibly is
me being a bit middle-aged.”
The idea came to him during a visit to a client in Esher, Surrey. “She was
funky, middle-aged, definitely a character,” he recalls. “She and her
husband paint and write or do music, whatever . . . So I designed a garden
for them.” In the end, the couple didn’t take him up on the plan, so he
decided to submit it to Chelsea. “It’s a contemporary garden,” he says. “But
it’s retro.”
The design began with a Japanese maple ( Acer palmatum), which Gavin
insists is a 1970s sort of a tree. He always starts with the trees, but the
centrepiece here is a studio. In the shape of a cross, it has glass walls
and a wooden roof that curves down softly at the ends, giving the impression
of wings. Inside, Bubble Chairs provide another 1970s touch.
From inside, the client can gaze at a pond flanked by irises and rustling
bamboos. At either end of the studio are paths dotted with daisy motifs –
balls of box (Buxus sempervirens) surrounded by cobbles arranged to
look like the petals. Flanking the path are borders where you’ll find Allium
‘Purple Sensation’, Hosta ‘Big Daddy’, Agapanthus
africanus and Echium pininana.
Some designers draw their plans on a piece of A4 or use a computer. Gavin uses
a beach, especially for his Chelsea designs. This year’s garden was sketched
out by the seaside in Co Kerry, in his native Ireland. “Beaches are great,”
he says. “You can feel the space and walk through the design. You can feel
the proportions. If it’s wrong, you can just rub it out and start again.”
Gavin has had mixed success at Chelsea. Last year, his entry was rejected.
“That was embarrassing,” he says. “They said they couldn’t see it as a
garden – but it was the most traditional thing I have ever designed.” It
looked like a huge birdcage, reminiscent of Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal
Palace, with chandeliers and rows of classical urns. It has since been built
for an Irish client.
Even when they let Gavin in, it doesn’t always go smoothly. In 2004, he had a
row with Bunny Guinness, his neighbour on site, about the size of a wall. He
called her “rude, elitist and a snob”; and the organisers complained that he
was “a nightmare to work with”.
Then, last year, he accused Andy Sturgeon, a fellow TV gardener who won a gold
at Chelsea, of plagiarism, even taking him to court. Sturgeon responded by
accusing Gavin of defamation, but the dispute has now been settled.
Gavin was born in London, but raised in suburban Dublin. An amateur
psy-chiatrist might see the whole of his early career as a belated teenage
rebellion against that suburban background. “I grew up in a conformist
society, where cherry trees and bedding plants were the only things you put
in the garden,” he says. He wanted to do something different, but was never
quite sure what.
His first ambition was to be a chef, but he eventually decided on a career in
gardening. So he started work at a garden shop in Dublin, before joining a
course at the city’s College of Amenity Horticulture, which is attached to
the National Botanic Gardens.
After college, he launched himself as a designer, but it didn’t go well. “I
went through a 10-year period of desperation,” he says. “I wasn’t getting
any clients.” The way Gavin tells it, he was virtually on the streets until
he was asked to work on a garden for Terry Keane, a social columnist whose
barrister husband, Ronan, would later become Chief Justice of Ireland. She
became not only patron to the young designer, but, later, his mother-in-law.
Gavin is married to her daughter, Jus-tine, and they have a two-year-old
girl.
His second big break came in 1995, when he and a friend won a bronze at
Chelsea and were fêted back home. Buoyed by this success, Gavin felt
confident enough to strike out in a different direction. He decided that the
world of gardening needed modernising. And that he was the man to do it.
So, for the following year’s Chelsea, he presented his vision of a
contemporary garden. “It was glass and steel, with what was then exotic
planting,” he recalls. “There was a curved glass wall with water pouring
down it. It was terrible, but I did a little piece on the television. Alan
Titchmarsh came round to see me, and that was it.”
The bad boy of gardening is a familiar face to the viewing public, most
notably because of Home Front, but also, these days, in shows like Strictly
Come Dancing and Only Fools on Horses, which was showjumping for beginners
in aid of Sport Relief last year. He has just finished working on a series
called I Want a Garden for the Irish broadcaster RTE, a project that
coincides with a move back to Dublin. His company, Diarmuid Gavin Designs,
is setting up an office in the city, and the family is leaving London for Co
Wicklow.
Gavin’s television style is not to everybody’s liking. Reviewing his series
Gardens Through Time in 2004, the Sunday Times critic AA Gill said: “His
Attila the Digger self-image is largely based on tearing up the past and
planting the future with balls on. It’s childish, sandpit gardening.” But
that’s fine with the new, mellow Diarmuid. “I got arrogant,” he says. “I was
doing 20 to 25 programmes a year and lost sight of the fact that it was a
privilege.”
He seems ready to see things differently now. A few years ago, a couple of
critics posed the question: “Diarmuid Gavin – genius or chancer?”
“I was devastated,” he says. “I realised not only that I wasn’t a genius, but
that I could never become a genius. I’m not even that brilliant. I’m very
good, but I’m not brilliant. Probably.”
The Westland Garden, by Diarmuid Gavin Designs, is at Main Avenue 23 at the
RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
GAVIN’S CHELSEA GARDEN TIPS
- Create your own paving design by using mosaics or cobbles.
- Keep the planting scheme predominantly green, using bulbs for highlights –
thread alliums through grasses, for example. This way, the scene will change
on a temporary basis for a couple of months.
- If you take off one of the side walls, a simple shed can be converted into a
garden pavilion, in which you will be able to work outside the house.
- Painted walls can provide a striking background. Choose aubergine for an
effective darker colour – it is especially good for contrast behind white
birch stems and lime-green foliage.
- Conserve water. Gavin’s high-tech building has internal drains that
feed directly into the pond, but you can just attach guttering to your
greenhouse or shed to run into a water butt.
- Trees such as silver birch provide a dappled canopy and help to ground and
frame a building.
- Complement a contemporary building by using plants with strong, contrasting
shapes and textures, such as strap-leaved phormiums with glossy
pittosporums, or blocks of silvery, sword-like astelias with feathery tree
ferns.
