Welcome to my website which hopefully reflects my passion for gardening. I will try to include some of my my favourite topics like" Gardening in the 21st century", Edible Gardens and Organic Gardening, plus Ireland's chronic shortage of trees as topics over the year. There are pics of The Afternoon Show on RTE where I have been the gardening contributor for the last six years.
There is a selection of gardening articles from my weekly column for "The Irish Mail On Sunday" which you might like to read.
"The Garden Gallery" is a suburban size garden, showcasing different garden styles, in a compact area. It can be viewed at Blackbanks Garden Centre in Dublin. Directions on how to visit it are on the "Garden Gallery" page. I have been working on this project over the last two years and it should be completed very soon, having said that when is a garden ever finished? but it is pretty close to completion now, you can be my judge by viewing the photos.
I also have tried to improve the garden shed by turning it into "An Outdoor Living Space" Working with Nicky Daly from Woodpeckers we have redesigned a 10 square metre shed as a cost efficient way to beat these credit crunch days. As a result you can create extra space for the house in the garden, it could be converted, into an extra office,playroom or in my case a studio and it can be built in different sizes, once again the web site has photos.
Various gardens I have worked on over the years are featured. One of the most interesting was Carrigoran Retirement Home and Alzheimer's Treatment Centre in Co Clare were we restored the Japanese garden as part of a competition for RTE s Afternoon Show.
Glorious Gardens is finally arriving to the screens starting on UTV on Monday 26th of July at 8pm, the series features six different types of gardens across Northern Ireland and each one has a unique story to tell.
Finally I will be launching" Gardening In The 21st Century"soon as a lecture covering how gardening is changing in the modern world and responding to all the new challenges in style, attitude to chemicals and environmental issues .
Latest News
Well next Monday is the last episode of "Glorious Gardens" ,over the last three weeks we have re built a care homes garden that was a very Bleak Bricked Courtyard.I have to say looking back that it was my favourite programme of the six, as we did something really special for the residents, and the amount of help we got really contributed to the high standard..
We then moved on to build a city garden on the Newtownards Road in Belfast bringing the important constituents of Soil,Grass,Shrubs and Trees.This was an area that had no green spaces at all, our hope is that it will get great use from the community, and that Birds,Bees and Butterfly's would follow .
Last Mondays episode featured Jane and Chris from Lisburn ,both are visually impaired, so this was not the type of garden you build every day,and made more daunting by the fact that Jane had not been in the garden for 10 years as it was to dangerous for her to go into. Thankfully it all ended happily and Jane now spends large amount of her time in the garden.
So to the final week, a Community Centre in Aughnacloy,where it rained a lot but was compensated for by the sunny locals who helped us to something quite simple but effective but was not helped by large amounts of Irish rain. You can judge for yourself how we did this Monday.
