I’VE GROWN IN LOCKDOWN
Realising the talent in this country has reignited my passion
Diarmuid says. ‘I am fearful about the future but I really did love it. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or to anybody around me. Having known somebody who had Covid there was fear of what it could do to somebody older. And who knows what is in front of us?’
Diarmuid’s regular work was gone in an instant too and he is still unsure of what might happen.
‘Who knows where the future in my business is?’ he says. ‘All work, including the flower shows, came dramatically to an end. One doesn’t know where this is going to end up but I am lucky that to date it has been okay for me.’
Indeed, he starts a new TV show on Friday on RTÉ One at 8pm called Gardening Together With Diarmuid Gavin, a TV version of those nightly Instagram chats where viewers can also send in their queries and get an answer from the experts.
‘It’s weird that someone would watch Instagram and say, “there might be a TV show in this”,’ he says. ‘It’s the most surreal thing. Mostly it has been brilliant but there is a bit of pressure with it too but in general it has been a real joy.
‘It’s mad busy — incredibly, because you just don’t know what to expect these days with everything that’s going on. But we are really enjoying it and enjoying other people’s enjoyment of their gardens too.’
The show is filmed in Diarmuid’s own garden so we will all get a glimpse of the place that kept him going through our tough times.
‘My favourite time of the day in the garden is the evening,’ Diarmuid explains. ‘The sunshine comes through our garden and turns everything gold at about six in the evening.
‘When I say gold, that’s exactly what it is. I have a funny garden in a way because everything gets back-lit. The sun comes through the leaves and in the evening I adore that.
‘From about the middle of May on into June and July it is extraordinary. It makes you realise what a brilliant country we live in for gardening.
‘We have this temperate climate and lack of extremes for heat and water, even though it doesn’t feel like that all the time.
‘Plants love to grow here so we can grow plants from all over the world, and we can create spaces that can transport us anywhere. This year has just been a total reawakening for me.
‘I was lucky in that after years and years and years of work my garden was beginning to look good anyway. The exhilaration of seeing it mature and do what I thought it might do and other parts of the garden just go their own way and surprise me.
‘Just by chance I met a whole load of young Irish gardeners who are just brilliant in terms of the craft of gardening and I began to see what they loved about gardening. I began to talk to them over Instagram and forget whatever role I had in gardening and embrace what they were doing.
‘The combination of realising the talent is there in this country and we can do whatever we want because plants love to grow in this country has been the things that reignited the passion in me.’
From manicured lawns to wildflower gardens, we’ve all been embracing our own shades of green, however small they may be.
‘What makes an Irish garden?’ Diarmuid ponders. ‘It’s that love of garden colour but with our essence. We are never too far from the land and the sea, we might have relatives who were farmers, we might go down the country for our holidays. And we have this extra thing that is the colour green.
‘I am in Wexford at the moment and I see a few buttercups beside me and a few orchids in the hedgerow but anything else I am looking at is green.
‘It’s only when you spend time abroad that you realise how precious that is and it is particular to Ireland.
‘There is a song Forty Shades of Green and we have 40,000 shades of it. I love that sort of gardening and a bit of colour thrown in. An Irish garden means something different to everybody, a bit of country garden, a bit of that bog thing, growing spuds in a bit of your garden and a bit of the green landscape and everything that the rain gives us.’
The excitement among new gardeners is palpable and the questions are coming in thick and fast from people all over the country for the man who put Irish gardening on the map.
He’s full of his usual exuberance and enthusiasm at the thought of our newly-acquired green fingers.
‘So many people have never grown things before and their excitement at being able to get seeds in the post during lockdown has had lots of people growing things like tomatoes now,’ he says.
‘You can have a garden absolutely anywhere. My mum sold the family house three or four years ago and she moved in closer to the city and she just has a balcony. On the programme we have made her balcony garden full of colour. But you can grow potatoes in small containers or herbs on a windowsill.
‘We show how you can buy a pot of basil from the supermarket and make ten plants out of it. If it’s gardening on a roof, a balcony or a windowsill, we cover all of it.’
Diarmuid’s creative energy for the TV show will also be applied to his own life, thanks to those days in the lockdown sunshine that made him fall back in love with his craft and our climate.
‘I think I have been confronted by something and I don’t think I want to live the life I had any more,’ he says. ‘I don’t see the point of getting up at 4.30am to shower and creep around the house not waking anyone and arriving in another city at 9am exhausted to go into a meeting. I just don’t know why I do that. So I think everything will be much more centred on this island and enjoying what we have here.’
But is this not a terrifying prospect, ripping up the rulebook after so many years?
‘I don’t think it is nerve wracking any more because you have to design another life for yourself,’ he says.
‘I think I will do a lot more teaching and open some sort of school of gardening and design because that is so rewarding.
‘There has been an element of being a pioneer, being an Irish gardener and being out there on the world stage. It doesn’t matter any more. It just so doesn’t matter. Now it is less about that and more about the craft of gardening, the joys that you can share and gardening with people.’
And Ireland, he says, has the perfect climate to do that in.
‘Our days are very interesting here,’ Diarmuid adds. ‘We have long days of sunlight and it always changes and dazzles.
‘My favourite type of garden has always been green and contrasting leaf colour and just seeing sunlight dance on that is a joy, I have always loved it.
‘In Ireland, you can’t dig a piece of soil without unearthing some seeds that will blossom into what we think of as weeds but it’s a piece of growth and that doesn’t happen everywhere in the world. Our climate is perfect for growing something.’
Watching his teenage daughter Eppie grow and being at home more with her and his wife Justine is what Diarmuid intends to do for the next while.
‘You want to be surrounded by those you care about at times like this,’ he says.
‘It’s still a time of crisis so you want to be taking care of them and you want to be understanding what they are growing through. So I think we are all happy to be together.’
And with that, he’s off to nurture the seeds of his new life.