Irish Garden designer Diarmuid Gavin and the Chelsea Flower Show

House and Garden News

Diarmuid Gavin Reveals his Dark Demons as he Prepares for the Chelsea Flower Show

LONDON, May 23 2006 --

Sex symbol garden designer Diarmuid Gavin has revealed the dark demons that inspired him to TV stardom and critical acclaim

The maverick garden designer was a teenage loner suffering depression as he was suffocated by his suburban roots.

The rebellious charm, wit and creative force that have won him an army of female admirers was nowhere to be seen as Diarmuid grew up a brooding youngster in Dublin.

And he had to endure a homeless year moving from friend to friend with his clothes in black bin liners as his first business sank without trace.

"There were tough times and dark days," he says, "I grew up being suffocated by suburbia.

"What I do now definitely has its roots in all that - just wanting to blow it all up. Maybe I'm having a joke on suburbia but I have also come to suburbia."

Diarmuid, 39, who starred in the BBC's hugely popular Home Front alongside Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, is putting the final touches to another controversial garden design which will compete in the traditional gentility of the 82nd Chelsea Flower Festival, which opens on Tuesday.

The futuristic 11 metre by 23 metre design, funded by National Lottery operator Camelot to celebrate the tenth birthday of the lottery this year, is a stunning riot of colour featuring a Faberge egg, spaceship-style slabs and pathways and multi-coloured balls.

His high-impact gardens, which use experimental materials and fantasy-fuelled designs, are the perfect example of his rebellion against the suburban reserve that shaped his early years.

"I was a bit of a dreamer and felt I didn't fit in. I was a bit lonely as a kid," he adds. "Growing up in the 80s wasn't a good time in Dublin. It was a time when rock groups Thin Lizzy and the Boomtown Rats had escaped and you felt you were left behind. It was a fairly depressing place and there was a huge lot of unemployment.

"I wasn't particularly social and didn't have loads of mates - I was seen as unusual because I didn't hang around with many people. I didn't enjoy school and wasn't enjoying life. But the minute I got out of it, everything changed.

Diarmuid's love of plants and outdoors life led to a job at a plant shop but his loathing of traditional gardens continued. "Whenever I planted anything exciting in our garden, my mum would invariably scythe it down with a strimmer just before it was about to flower because she didn't recognize it," he jokes.

"I got into gardening because I wasn't much good at anything else. I wasn't very good academically because I just wasn't interested. I liked being outdoors but didn't particularly like gardens at that stage.

"I loved the idea of growing plants but thought the gardens I visited were plain boring. I heard about this college in Dublin you could go to where the academic requirements were not that great provided you were interested."

The College of Amenity Horticulture rejected Diarmuid's first application and he worked for three years in the shop before taking up a three year degree course place.

"It was a knockback but it was at a time when I was coming out of my shell after I had been unhappy for many years growing up. I was having the time of my life so it didn't matter.

"From the moment I decided to go into gardening, I knew what I wanted to do in it. I wanted to change things and make gardens more appropriate to me.

"I used to look at my parents' back garden which was very neat but awful and think about ways I could explode it. Gardening can be so bloody elite and hoity-toity and I wanted to break away from that.

"I went into the garden design industry in Ireland and it was really straight-laced and dull. I decided to see if I could do something about it. But the basis of what I am now is all back there - reacting against and having fun with suburbia. There were too many rules and it was all to do with your place in society, things had to be pretty."

Diarmuid was soon in demand and his designs award-winners but performing in a narrow creative band began to affect his business.

"I could design a garden on the back of an envelope and it would look brilliant and I was doing this for clients all over Dublin and I started doing it badly because it was doing my head in," he says. "My business just went downhill from the start. It took seven years but it was relentlessly down.

"I always had people who believed in me and I would let them down and they would feel very let down. It was tough because these were people I liked and I was bouncing cheques. It wasn't because I was trying it on or anything; it was just the way the business had got. Sometimes I couldn't bear to go back to gardens and put the last three plants in because I didn't like the result and I would end up getting nothing for it."

Diarmuid ended up homeless and penniless as he abandoned gardening.

"It wasn't going where I wanted so I had to get out. I gave myself a year to think about it and see what else came up. I decided that if another profession came up I would take it.

"I had no money, my clothes were in bin liners in somebody's garden because I couldn't afford a flat and I was kicked out of houses. I was nearly 30 but I couldn't go back home. I had no money - not even 50p - and was staying a few nights here and there on floors and sofas.

"When you get that low, you cannot get any lower so you think 'the fightback has to start now'. I have a great capacity for not getting things right. I am dedicated but I am not very business minded, I have always had a blind faith that something was going to happen and I would be ok.

"It wasn't a very pleasant time. But I believed there would be something else and this is what it turned out to be."

The turning point was meeting his wife Justine, the daughter of an Irish judge.

"I would spend a few nights a week with her and she believed in me," he adds. "I thought: 'Why would you, you are amazing, I've never met anyone like you before'. That was weird for me. People had faith in me and I started again."

A design at the Royal Dublin Show was well received and encouraged him to attempt the Chelsea Flower Show with a design he and a mate knocked together for GBP300.

"We won a bronze award - there are loads of them and you virtually get one for turning up but we went back to Ireland and people thought we'd come third at the Chelsea Flower Show," says Diarmuid.

He came back the next year and was noticed by Alan Titchmarsh and Diarmuid was signed up for TV - a 'right place, right time' moment, he says modestly.

Diarmuid is a reluctant gardening sex symbol but his uncompromising style and devilish approach won him an equal measure of adulation from female fans and garden devotees.

He continues to court controversy and the battles to create his Chelsea Flower Show garden have made compulsive TV viewing in BBC's Diarmuid's Big Adventure.

The garden was without a sponsor until Camelot came to the rescue.

"I was a bit arrogant and thought I would be swamped by offers but instead there was just silence," he admits. "I was too dumb to think of the lottery even though it had coloured balls. Thankfully, they called me and wanted it to celebrate the tenth birthday of The National Lottery. Camelot saved my bacon. I was pretty demented by then.

"I am not trying to shock people here. I want to see visitors looking at it and then see a smile slowly spreading across their faces. I think it will do well but I am not that interested in what medal it might get - that is not the point," says Diarmuid, who presents the BBC's upcoming series Art of the Garden, looking back at the history of garden design.

"What I am saying and what I want to show is that you can be different. We are trying to have a bit of fun. Chelsea can be utterly pretentious and there is too much stuffy elitism and pseudo-intellectual rubbish about gardening.

"People say that my stuff is not 'normal' but it is no more so than garden sheds that look like Swiss chalets that a lot of people have. How weird is that?

"Gardening tradition is wonderful but there was nothing contemporary around. Fashion, music, cars and clothes design had moved on but there was nothing in gardening that reflected that. I want gardening to be more relevant to me and lots of other people.

"I've had great support from Camelot, other investors and friends who have come over from Ireland to work for nothing. I've put everything into it and I think people will like it.

"It has been a very long road to Chelsea. I am fraught, exhausted but excited."

Diarmuid hopes the garden will be sold to a wealthy collector at the end of the Flower Show and he intends to use the proceeds to create two gardens in Bristol and Dublin that will be used by children and cancer patients.

The last in the series of Diarmuid's Big Adventure will be broadcast on Tuesday 25th May at 9pm on BBC 2

Art of the Garden, a new series looking back at the history of garden design, begins on Friday 28th May at 9pm on BBC 2.

Distributed by PR Newswire on behalf of Camelot Group Plc

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