AN award-successful backyard designer has manufactured record by getting to be the to start with Irish person to earn a medal at a prestigious Australian flower display.
Peter Donegan received a Gold Medal with The Bam Stone Back garden at Melbourne International Flower and Garden Present 2023 – producing him the initial ever Irish designer to win a medal at the internationally renowned display.
He is also the 1st Irish person to layout and exhibit a exhibit backyard for the yearly competitors.
His profitable entry was one particular of only five to acquire the Gold Exhibit Backyard Award at the 2023 celebration which ran from March 29 to April 2.
Peter Donegan (centre) and workforce pictured at their medal-successful backyardThe installation, a 200 square meter demonstrate back garden, was manufactured by Semken Landscaping, who have been building gardens considering the fact that 1987 and are the most medalled contractor in the flower show’s background.
The Bam Stone boasted the Dublin-born designer’s up to date eyesight of a really like tale, depicting two hearts separated by a compact island off the coast of Galway to the mainland, and it rapidly became popular amongst the 120,000 site visitors to the Melbourne exhibit, which took put at earth heritage web-site The Royal Exhibition Making and Carlton Gardens.
Describing the do the job, the Peter Donegan Backyard Structure crew explained: “Featuring a series of purely natural bluestone measures that symmetrically weave their way by a rocky landscape, recognisant of the journey produced across the Atlantic from the Connemara coastline, the desired destination became a limestone (moleanus) island featuring planting, shelter, and a solitary autumnal 8 metre tall Liriodendron tulipifera reflecting across the black h2o, a beacon to these who wish to return to their like.”
They increase: “From a back garden development standpoint the style and design and make was a daring one on a web page where a person are unable to penetrate or dig in any way below floor of the Unesco secured planet heritage website and grew to become the major ever back garden featuring water in the show’s record and the most hard construct Donegan and Semken have at any time carried out.
Peter Donegan’s Irish backyard garden depicts a like story“The tale, albeit interpretive, is of a gentleman hoping, in fact in vain that on the island his beau and he will meet and be jointly.
“That even so is of a daydream and completely plausible by sole advantage of creativity and daydreams exactly where their unachievable gets to be attainable and separation by drinking water no longer exists.
“The garden is also agent of love’s quite a few forms – unrequited adore, genuine adore kept aside by length, or unconditional lovers no extended physically jointly but in no way neglected in the coronary heart.”
In 2001, aged 24, Ms Donegan started Peter Donegan Back garden Structure in Dublin.
It quickly received a host of awards for 17th and 18th century gardens intended and exhibit gardens at countrywide competitors.
From 2019 to 2022 The RHS silver medallist turned the sequence garden designer for Ireland’s most watched tv present and RTE television’s Diy SOS The Major Create Ireland.
In the course of his time in Australia, Mr Donegan found time to visitor lecture at The Royal Botanic Gardens in Victoria and at Melbourne College.
