BRIAN’S SHOW GARDEN FOR BLOOM FLOWS FROM INSIDE
Award winning garden designer, former gold and silver medal Bloom winner and Supergarden judge Brian Burke is back once again at Bloom in the Park with his Woodie’s show garden ‘Seomra Eile’ (Another Room), designed in conjunction with Woodie’s. It depicts the garden as an extension of a contemporary home, with a natural flow from inside to outside.
Bloom visitors love it. Over the past two years people have found a renewed appreciation for outdoor spaces and are interested in how to make the most of their gardens. Brian has captured this, as his soothing show garden shows how a garden can be an extension of the home.
His garden is modern and sharp, achieved with the clever use of contemporary materials and planting. Brian employs clever hacks such as using an interior flooring finish outside, accessorised lighting and outside furniture with similar colouring and character to the inside of a home.
To create a real sense that the visitor is inside a house looking out into the back garden, Brian has created a wall in the show garden with a reproduction of a large window, similar to that found in contemporary house design, making the experience of looking from the home into the garden even more real! This kind of viewer experience enhancement has not previously been done in the Bloom setting.
After Bloom draws to a close, all plants and trees will be re-potted and managed for future use. Appropriate plants and built elements will be donated to a variety of charitable causes in the Kildare and Laois area. In 2016 plants and materials from Brian’s Bloom garden were re-used to build a garden for the residents of the Syrian refugee reception centre in Monasterevin in Co Kildare, and in 2017 plants were donated to the Cuisle Cancer Care Centre in Portlaoise.
The garden is sponsored by Woodie’s and everything used in it is available at the 35 Woodie’s stores.
Show Garden Planting Scheme
The two large beds are filled with a mixture of herbaceous flowering perennials and perennial grasses. The aim is to create softness and also a scheme which would be appropriately contemporary and compatible with the domestic setting Brian is attempting to evoke with the heavily glazed ‘building’. The primary plants Brian
uses here are Lychnis, Armeria, Geum, Salvia, Iberis, Calamagrostis, Hakonechloa and some shrubs, namely Cornus kousa. The backdrop trees are multi-stem Birch.