Gardening leave – why ‘office Edens’ are sprouting up around the world
Inspired by her family heritage, Laura Bonner (33) set up her own drinks company with business partner Tom Russell, and is soon to launch an Irish potato gin
EMPLOYERS are hoping ‘office oases’ – lush garden spaces in stuffy workplaces – will help boost staff productivity and creativity.
An increasing number of companies are embracing biophilia – the idea that humans benefit from a connection with nature.
This year, Amazon opened a flora filled ‘cloud forest’ structure called The Spheres in its Seattle headquarters.
The buildings are pentagon orbs sheltering 40,000 plants and accommodating 800 workers.
According to Amazon, it also helps employees think ‘outside the box’.
In Microsoft’s Washington offices there are designated “outdoor districts” where employees can have meetings in tree houses.
Now the trend is reaching Irish shores.
Irish landscape designer Oliver Schurmann believes being surrounded by nature stimulates the mind and increases efficiency.
“We need nature to enhance our lives,” he said.
“Watching nature unfold will encourage people to think and reflect.
“It also brings the real world into the artificial world of an office.”
As part of Bord Bia’s Bloom festival, Mr Schurmann and his wife Liat have designed an idyllic office garden in conjunction with Savills.
The show garden is called ‘A Different Outlook’ and features sunken office rooms to give workers a “worm’s-eye view” of the surrounding landscape.
A shallow water pool allows light to reflect patterns onto the ceiling.
“The garden wraps around the office and should result in a calmer working environment,” he said.
It is one of 20 spectacular show gardens on display at Bord Bia’s Bloom this year.
A dementia-friendly garden called ‘Moments of Time’ hopes to provide solace for those living with memory loss.
More than 50,000 people are living with dementia in Ireland and this garden creates a safe and soothing space for them, and their families.
The garden, which is part ofa campaign led by the HSE in partnership with the Alzheimer Society of Ireland, has been planted with flowers that are popular with older generations such as daisies, carnations and hydrangeas. The scent of these flowers will tap into long-term memories. The team behind the garden also advises gardeners to include items in the garden that link with
the person’s past, such as a vegetable patch, or a bird table.
This marks the 12th year of the gardening festival, which takes more than a year to organise.
The festival will be officially opened by President Micheal D Higgins and will feature 50 botanical art displays and 110 food and drink stands.
Nearly 700 people are involved in the building on the 70-acre site, with a total of 4,000 people working onsite over the five days.
The popularity of gardening has increased exponentially in recent years.
More than 1.3 million Irish people now garden on a regular basis with the average person spending €381 on gardening annually.
During the festival, visitors will spend €9m on plants and pots.
They will also have the chance to listen to specialists discuss upcoming garden trends including ‘room scaping’, medicinal grow rooms, and how ‘generation rent’ can make the most of limited garden spaces. Food demonstrations will take place at the Bord Bia Quality Kitchen, as well as live fashion shows throughout the day. Visitors are advised to arrive early to miss the crowds.
WhenIwas19I sent all my family an email. The subject was ‘Muff Liquor Company’. I said I was going to make vodka.
I studied law after school and I hated it. I went to London to work in property. I started off in lettings and then I became a director in the UK for an Australian company.
My business partner, Tom Russell from Manchester, was willing to take a chance so I left my job and my apartment and moved back to Greencastle in Co Donegal, where I’m from, to concentrate on the business.
That was last December. People think I just woke up one day with this idea but this has been something I’ve been thinking of for a long time.
I wanted to set up a distilled spirits company and specifically producing a potato-based spirit.
My grandfather Philip McClenaghan was a well-known potato farmer in Greencastle. One of his many hobbies was to make a poitín with potatoes, so the idea of making a potato-based spirit, inspired by my grandfather and that could originate from Ireland just stuck with me.
Tom loved the idea and identified with the opportunity in the craft liquor market, so we took the plunge. It’s not been easy, but it’s been so fulfilling to create something from scratch, with family heritage at its heart.
Once the money was in place it was really easy, because everything about it is real.
We went for gin first because it had become so popular. Last month we went to the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America expo in Las Vegas and we won Spirit of the Year. That was a game-changer for us. We were only 13 weeks old at the time. We weren’t even there for the awards ceremony as we’d left before the end and they said ‘Come back, you’ve won Spirit of the Year’.
We had spoken to a lot of distilling companies and we thought ‘let’s build our brand first’. We now lease a still in west Cork and we get the gin made there with our own recipe.
We import the potato spirit base and then it’s fermented with four types of Irish potatoes. Our main ingredients are mandarin, lemon, rosemary and elderflower and one ‘secret’ ingredient, which we have since disclosed as champagne essence.
We put all the ingredients into the still and we try to keep everything as natural as possible. The result of this is a fresh and vibrant gin that carries sweet notes and is quite smooth to drink.
The smoothness is the direct result of the potato base and is something that differentiates us from sharper-tasting distilled gins on the market at present.
Also, because we are using a potato base rather than a grain base, the benefit is that our gin is wheat-free and gluten-free, which is something that was important to us from the beginning of this process.
Our gin is completely different. Every gin has juniper in it but ours is not juniper-led. We’ve enough in it to make it a gin but ours is very smooth because of the potatoes.
The brand is visually very much inspired by the past. My grandfather kept journals of recipes for his poitín, food, and plans for things he would build around the farm. This old journal style is the basis of our brand and a lot of our visuals, and will be the main theme running through our physical and digital marketing. These were the ideas Granda McClenaghan passed down through my family and it’s something I want to make sure is at the centre of everything we do. That is the reason an illustration of him adorns the back of the bottle and I couldn’t be prouder to have him as a representation of the ideas and values of this company.
With his name on the bottle, I wanted to make sure my family was proud of it. There were
The Muff Liquor Company name is a bit cheeky, but we want to be remembered as a good product and stand out in bars
originally 36 first cousins — now there’s 160 of us. We’re all really close, we’re a tribe.
My grandfather was one of nine. He was full of divilment. I always told him what I was going to do and I used to ask him how he made the poitín. Eventually he said ‘fine’ and he asked me cut up some potatoes and steam them. Basically I just made him his dinner.
I used to go off up the hills with him when he was cutting turf. I wasn’t good in school — I was told was a social butterfly and would amount to nothing. I wasn’t school-oriented whatsoever. I had no idea this was going to take off the way it did. We sold our first pallet before we even launched.
The name The Muff Liquor Company is something we believe makes us stand out from the completion. It is a bit cheeky but we want to be remembered as a good product that stands out in bars.
I’m splitting myself all over the place at the minute but the idea is to build a distillery in the border village of Muff in Donegal. We have drawings of what we’d like it to look like. It all depends on Brexit. Are we going to have a hard border?
Our vodka is ready and we are creating a Muff rum at the moment. I’d like to have a range of tonic waters. It’s totally allconsuming at the minute and I cry from the stress of it some days.
My grandfather would be over the moon that he’s on the back of the bottle. I’m like him – I just never give up. I’m stubborn when I really believe in something.
The Muff Liquour Company will have a pop-up bar at Bloom in the Park, which runs from May 31 to June 4. In conversation with