Bright sparks
Sisters Sofia and Diana Diadiajeva from Edenderry, Co Offaly, were winners of Brightest at Bloom at the festival in the Phoenix Park.
“I FEEL like a big imposter,” beamed Melanie Webb, who never designed a garden before – yet managed to pull off a particularly special victory at Bloom.
Her ‘Growing Shed Award’ was crowned the People’s Choice over the course of the festival.
It was an “accidental” entry to the prestigious show garden competition, explained Melanie, who lives in Greystones, Co Wicklow.
A former teacher who retrained as an interior architect, Melanie found herself in need of a garden shed but could not find anything that suited – so she designed one herself.
Without much space left for planting in her garden after the shed went in, she decided to incorporate a stepped roof planted with trays of herbs, sedums, grasses and a cascade of delicate flowers that thrive in shallow soil.
It inspired so much admiration amongst her friends that she decided to enter it into Bloom. The organisers got back to her to say they loved it, but asked if she could design a small garden around it and that she could enter it as a show garden.
Melanie added low stone walls and simple plants like pink roses and ferns “that anyone can get in the garden centre”.
The result was a sweet, wistful and artful design that made visitors to Bloom stop in their tracks.
“It’s very simple but it was designed with a lot of love and passion,” said Melanie.
“I had a lot of people who said: ‘Oh, I have walls like that, I could plant flowers like that too’,” she said.
Many people felt like that, it was clear, because out of all the show-stopping gardens at Bloom, this was the one that was selected by the people to be their favourite.
The prize is particularly bittersweet, she said, saying that her mother Johanna Hotz, a keen gardener, came
to Bloom in 2012 just a short time before her death.
“She would be very proud of me today,” said Melanie.
“Other people would be taking the weeds off the roof – maybe we need to embrace them,” said one woman, as she stopped to admire Melanie’s shed.
Amid day-long blazing sunshine, the last day of Bloom 2018 was a particularly busy one and from early morning the queue of traffic into the Phoenix Park was almost at a standstill.
In all, some 119,000 people attended the festival over the course of the bank holiday weekend.
The fine weather of recent days will continue with temperatures expected to climb even higher, reaching 26C tomorrow and Thursday.
However, Met Éireann has warned that while the mercury will rise to 25°C today, many areas will see heavy showers in the afternoon with thundery downpours in the west of the country.
“[Tomorrow] will be another warm day with temperatures reaching up to 25C or 26C in the middle of the country,” said a Met Éireann spokesperson.
“From what we can see right now, cooler weather is looking to set in from Thursday onwards, so a bit of a cooler weekend compared to the higher temperatures we will be seeing this week.”
Meanwhile, after a fourday stopover in Dublin, 16 Tall Ships weighed anchor yesterday as they set sail for Bordeaux in France. The impressive ships welcomed over 100,000 visitors over the bank holiday weekend as they were hosted by Dublin City Council.
Large crowds also gathered at Bike Fest West at the Galway Plaza outside Loughrea yesterday to watch Galway native Mattie Griffin, a renowned stunt rider, show off his high-octane moves.
The event was held in aid of Blood Bike West, whose volunteers deliver essential blood and other urgent medical supplies to hospitals.