Gardening P3

Site Design: Ellen Landscape Designs

Irish take two prizes at Chelsea Flower Show (Irish Times)

More Chelsea success for expert Elma (Leinster Leader)

Paula Cambell meets Miss Daisy (Leinster Leader)

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In Yellow Furze in Co. Meath, she designed the Garden of Peace and Tranquillity at the Church of the Assumption, a memorial the the five girls who died in the Navan school bus crash. Five standing stones preserve the memory of these young lives, while five oak seats provide a contemplative resting space for visitors.

Her highest-profile project was her 2005 debut in Chelsea Flower Show, where her Moat and Castle eco-garden won a silver medal and was voted one of the top three gardens to visit at the show. “It’s fantastic experience to be involved, but it is very pressurised. I couldn’t believe how tight the space was in which we had to build the garden. I would love to do it all again, but it’s an expensive ordeal, and you need lots of sponsorship.”

The focus for her Chelsea garden was sustainability. Wild flowers and old apple trees gave it as meadowy feel, and even the hard design had a sustainable edge, in its recycle-glass path and much-discussed swimming pond, which Fenton is re-creating for Bloom. At a time of increasing concern about the wisdom of swimming in heated chlorinated water in an air-conditioned room, the earthy appeal of swimming ponds is obvious.

“There’s a beautiful silky feel to the water when you are swimming in it. We use lots of reeds – mainly phragmites – as the border in the pond, and they organically filter the water. The pond is filled from run-off water from the rest of the site, so that it is self-contained. They are quite popular on the Continent, but it had never been done in Ireland or the UK, so I thin it really caught the imagination.”

- Michael Kelly