The notion of borrowed landscape is a concept with which you become fairly familiar in this line of work. The phrase itself should be self-explanatory; what is visible beyond the confines of a garden or space has a huge bearing on the character of a place. In some instances, it may be positive and needs… Read more »

There was a woman on the radio the other day who has just written a book entitled “Why Your Five-Year-Old Could Not Have Done That”. She is an advocate of the gallery system as an effective means of bringing worthwhile pieces of art to the attention of the public. She made the point that it… Read more »

Social media gets a bad rap. By some accounts it is nothing more than a toxic vortex, a black hole into which is disappearing the best years of our lives. Any time spent on Facebook looking at some vague acquaintance’s carefully staged skiing photographs is time you’ll never get back. Time that would be better… Read more »

Here’s what most people know about Ballymun. It is a working- class suburb of north Dublin City. In the 1960s it was a particularly deprived working- class suburb of north Dublin City into which it was decided to insert a bunch of high rise concrete apartment blocks wherein, it was hoped, the good people of… Read more »

I subscribe to an American magazine entitled ‘The Dirt’, the monthly publication of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). That designation is important, ‘landscape architects’. Because here we have another one of those common instances where confusion surrounds the language we habitually use to describe something or to make certain subtle distinctions between things.… Read more »

There I was the other day wondering why I don’t spend more time agonising over plant choices for the interior of my house. It’s a well-recognised phenomenon, particularly in Ireland, that our gardens are as much for gazing upon and admiring from the inside as they are for immersing oneself in on the outside. So,… Read more »

So, there was my wife a couple of weeks ago over in New York improving her personal best for the marathon while I single handedly kept the show on the road back home. And in order to assuage her overwhelming guilt at abandoning us for a week she did manage to bring me home a… Read more »

Whatever happened to topiary? Topiary, just in case you don’t know, is defined as the art or practice of clipping shrubs or trees into ornamental shapes. The shrub most commonly used by the topiary practitioner is undoubtedly Buxus sempervirens, or to give it its common name, box. I could count on the fingers of one… Read more »

I lived and worked in New England for nine years, from 1997 to 2006. In the gardening and landscaping business in the U.S.A one thing that always struck, and surprised, me was how conservative they are regarding what they are prepared to do, or even try, in the garden. My default preconception heading to America… Read more »

We are afraid of the weather. Sometimes, as was the case last Monday fortnight, this is quite justified. Occasionally our weather can throw a Shakespearean dose of lethal malevolence at us and we rightly hunker down and cower in fear. Our weather is for the most part benign, we are not exempt from the odd… Read more »