EP221- Gardening for the Soul: Des Doyle Chats About His New Book Growing Beauty

In this weeks episode John chats with Des Doyle, garden designer, course creator and now author all about his new book "Growing Beauty". The conversation goes in many directions as Des sharing his gardening knowledge with us, we delve into sustainability, garden design, great plant combinations, gardening for mental health and so much more.

Discover the transformative power of gardening with the wisdom of Des Doyle, who returns to grace our show following his memorable insights from episode 53. With his new book "Growing Beauty" in hand, Des takes us on an intimate tour of his personal garden sanctuary, guiding us through the rhythmic dance of seasons and the intricate beauty of plant life. Our conversation blossoms, shedding light on creating spaces that resonate with their environment and the healing touch that comes with every leaf and petal.

Sustainability in gardening often seems like an elusive goal, but not when Des Doyle shares his approach to cultivating eco-conscious and historically resonant landscapes. We navigate the delicate balance between aesthetic allure and environmental responsibility, exploring the selection of robust plants like hellebores and the cautionary tale of trend-driven, resource-intensive species such as dahlias. This episode champions the virtues of supporting local nurseries and making garden choices that echo far beyond the confines of our own backyards, fostering a greener future for our communities and our world.

Des imparts his expertise on creating a garden that captivates across all seasons. From the strategic use of foliage to the interplay of light and shadow, we uncover the secrets to a perennially enchanting garden. Candida Firth McDonald and filmmaker Alan's contributions are celebrated for bringing "Growing Beauty" to life in book and film.

We round off the episode chatting about the restorative benefits of gardening and nature when it comes to mental health with Des chatting personally about how gardening helped him with his own mental health struggle a number of years ago.

"Growing Beauty" the superb first book by Des Doyle is available to purchase here:
https://gardenfable.com/product/growing-beauty-book/

You can also contact Des through his website here:
https://gardenfable.com/contact/

If there is any topic you would like covered in future episodes, please let me know.
Email:  info@mastermygarden.com   

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Until next week  
Happy gardening  
John 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

how's it going everybody? And welcome to episode 221 of master, my garden podcast. Now, this week is yet again another wet week, but to bring some cheer to to proceedings, this week I'm talking to des dials. So des is a garden designer, a writer, and his new book is out now called Growing Beauty, and that is launched in conjunction with a short film about the same topic of his own garden.

Speaker 1: 0:37

And the book is brilliant. It's really well laid out and it takes you through, I suppose, the origin story of the garden and then right through the different seasons and within each season there's kind of stars of the show, so the, I suppose the stars of spring, summer, autumn and winter, des online and the garden. He's very good at highlighting the lesser, I suppose, months where the rest of us might forget about our garden. Des actually turns them into heroes. So brilliant winter color, brilliant autumn color and all of that is sort of wrapped together beautifully in this book.

Speaker 1: 1:18

So we spoke to Des back in January 21 actually, which seems like a lifetime ago now, but it was on episode 53, and from the couple of weeks after that we talked a lot about grasses during that episode and in the, the weeks after the episode, the amount of people that actually messaged to say they had gone back through several times to write down notes of the various plants that Des mentioned, and particularly the grasses that Des mentioned, and particularly the grasses that Des mentioned during the episode. But now you're going to get a chance with this new book to actually hold it and see the plants list, because there's an extensive plant list in it. So, des, you're very, very welcome. Back to the podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:58

Thanks so much, john. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1: 2:00

Yeah, there's a, there's a lot happening for you and there's a lot we're going to chat about in today's episode and the few weeks after the last episode, which, as I said, january 21,. It's a while ago now, and I got a lot of messages at the time around that people had listened back and actually took notes of the plant names that you mentioned and you know they listening to you. I would say a lot of the plants you talk about are no fluff. They're. They're very hardy, good performing plants, shrubs, trees for irish gardens, and I think that's something that really stands out and it definitely comes true in the book that I've just looked through today. So, yeah, tell us about the garden, I suppose, first, and then the origin of the book and, as I say, it's it's a really well laid out book and and lots of inspiration in it.

Speaker 2: 2:57

Thanks so much. Um, yeah, so the garden is, um, actually it's around. It's around the house where I live. It was originally my parents and lads garden House was built in 1810. It's on a west, east-west kind of axis, sloped towards the river west. Evening sun towards the front of the house and a lot of very well-drained soil Could dry out very, very quickly and even with all this rain, it's still not too bad. Um, so I'm lucky in that respect, but then when we have a very hot summer, uh, it really bakes, you know. So the garden, the garden, really.

Speaker 2: 3:38

I started gardening in 2012. Um, I just kind of I'd lost my job. I, you know, I'd had a really a series of really bad months with depression and anxiety, and it was a really difficult time in my life and I just I'd always been interested in gardening, but I'd never kind of really got into it in the sense that I'd made much of a garden, and so I just started on small things. It was really just looking at the garden. I had lots of space, and it was trying to figure out OK, what do I do here, what don't I do, what should I do, and it was just trial and error. I'm completely self-taught and it was just by mistakes. That's how I learned. Because it's an old house and it's an old garden, it was really important that everything was fitting, that everything was um, I suppose, if you like, complementary to that architecture. I couldn't do anything too modern, but um. So I guess, looking back on that time, what I what I could say now is and the book explores this is that people get really tied up in. You know how to do a garden, how to design a garden, how to get all the things into a garden.

Speaker 2: 4:50

A garden really is just a frame. It doesn't matter what size or shape it is, it's a frame with things happening in it and you decide, as the designer, what you know, what you want to have to have in it. Um, and I think, if people can simplify that as a concept, that it's really just a square or a circle or a triangle or whatever shape your garden is, and you have to set your intent. You know what do I want to do. Where do I want people to go? You know? Do I want them to go to a pond? Do I want them to sit down? Do I want them to go around the garden? Do I want them to go through the garden. So that's actually, for me, the start point of any garden that I design, or even my own garden.

Speaker 2: 5:28

What do I want to do in this space and in this garden? The space is really irregular, so I couldn't get a formal space, even though I would have loved a formal rectangle. So I had to kind of create a central point and that kind of came easy, because in 2014, I lost a huge amount of trees in the storm and so suddenly all my woodland was gone, which is covered in the book as well and suddenly I have this huge open space. And that was kind of the beginning of me looking at the challenges of designing a garden. And you know, how do I make the center of this garden be the center? How do I make people want to go there? How do I? What else do I do around the garden?

Speaker 2: 6:10

And the temptation was to put loads of things in, but because it's an old country garden, I had to be really subtle with that. You know, I'm really quite, you know, tight about what I use, so I used, you know, nice steps, good hedges, punctuation points. You know, summer has some specimen trees and if you think of the garden, as I said, as being a frame. The easiest way, then, to think about that after that is that, as a gardener or a garden designer, your job then is to create moments in that frame. Like so you create a spring moment which is snowdrops and narcissi, and then you you have an early summer moment, which is tulips and jams, and then you have summer borders, which is dahlias and whatever else, if you assuming you have some and then you have an autumn moment which is grasses, and then you have winter structure, which really comes to the fore with dogwoods and cliptues and stuff like that, and then you're back in spring.

Speaker 2: 7:13

So, as I see any garden that I designed, it's eight distinct moments and gardens that lack. Those are kind of they fail a little bit, because you know there's so many gardens that, really, where you could put in loads of snowdrops and make them amazing. They've great architecture, they've good lawns, they've good trees, so then you could put in more narcissi and remember snowdrops, narcissi, they're all things that bulk up there. It's never money wasted. They'll always work really, really well. They'll increase every year and you can increase them every year. So my garden started from having none of that stuff. It just was a space, um. But I soon realized the importance of moments. So I would have worked like a lot on snowdrops first, and then a lot on narcissi, and then a lot on hellebores, and then a lot on um tulips and then borders and so on and grasses. But to do that you have to have the frame and the structure to do it right. And so once you have that frame and structure and flower beds laid out, it's very easy.

Speaker 1: 8:15

That's very much an extension of a point I had Adele Feary on a couple of weeks ago and she referenced that as well. You know know, where you're not looking at four seasons, you're looking at I think six was kind of the figure you had she had in in her in her design work, and you're kind of saying eight periods and and it's a nice way of putting it moments.

Speaker 2: 8:36

So eight moments and that's what you're looking to capture within the frame of the garden yeah, I think I think if you, if you start getting bogged down on summer color and the importance of the garden yeah, I think I think if you, if you start getting bogged down on summer color and the importance of your garden looking good all summer, you kind of lose focus on all the other bits, you know. Um, so if you, if you focus on summer color, you're going to be june to october, june, september, and then everything else falls apart. So its structure is really vitally important and I know very few good gardens that don't have good structure, and a lot of 18th century gardens and older gardens, particularly in the uk, have really good bones, really good structure. Um, they've got good vistas, you know, and that's what makes them good. So, plants am I a plants person? Structure is more important to me than plants, and then plants come later.

Speaker 2: 9:28

But then, getting on to the second part of your question, I asked myself what is a good plant? Why would we use certain plants? And I suppose, from experimentation, I would probably trial between 50 and 100 new plants every year, that I would start to smoke P9s, usually from nurseries or from. I get some in the UK, I get some from the Netherlands. And what am I looking for? Something that's weatherproof, doesn't need to be sprayed, doesn't need to be staked, doesn't fall over, it's not tender usually, although there are some exceptions and it does a good job. And it doesn't, that doesn't mean it flowers, it means it has good foliage or it's enduringly kind of nice. From you know, one point to the other point. Um yeah, tough plants you know like, and there's a lot of plants out there that are kind of really good, but people you know are a bit critical of them, like you know, pitosporum Penstemon, some of the bamboos, you know, things like Vinca, which is just a really, really good plant.

Speaker 2: 10:35

People don't use it because it's seen as old hash but it's, you know, hugely drought tolerant flowers from December right through to April. You know anything with it, it's evergreen, pollinated. So there's a lot of plants like that that I think are really underused. And good plants for me are plants that can do a number of jobs in a garden. You know, something could give you fantastic, let's say, say, spring color and then just have really good presence throughout the year. You know, and a lot of my favorite plants are actually, you know, bucclarum fruticosum, stuff like that. That's really just evergreen. Got a little bit of flower in summer, but it's just gorgeous presence. A lot of the aborbeas are like that, so, and grasses are really important that we still don't use enough grasses. They're drought tolerant, low maintenance. They don't spread.

Speaker 1: 11:32

I don't know why people don't use them yeah, that's something I remember back from our our last conversation, which which is a couple of years ago now, but it's um, I remember and I forget the phrase you used, but you did say at the time you weren't big, say on, on dahlias or things that were going to require, you know, a lot of water to keep them going over the summer and you were looking for this kind of spread or something that would give you something at multiple stages throughout the year, and I think that's a really great way of looking at it and something like a vinca. You know, in today's terms you'd be hard pressed in a lot of garden centers to find the vinca. I wonder if that's because it's underused? Now, I think is what you said. I wonder is that because at some point, 10, 15, 20 years ago it was overused?

Speaker 2: 12:21

yeah, I think, like if you talk about vinca, it's a really underused plant but it's. It's very historically important. You see it in all the old gardens. It's a really important part of very old Georgian gardens which is used a lot as ground cover, usually under you. So you see it in those kind of gardens, I think garden.

Speaker 2: 12:40

You know, plants go through fashions and phases. You know we're going through a big heritage narcissi thing there, with the snowdrop thing. Hellebores are really important. They're all good plants, but good plants have to do a good job, you know, and if it doesn't do a good job, they fall out of favor. But I do see a lot of gardens often where I'm brought into refresh planting where there's a lot of plants used that just are really poor, you know, and I just you know people think, oh, I have to change the path or to do this or to do that. They don't. They just have to take out the plants that aren't performing. So I just get rid of plants that are not performing, because life's too short to grow plants that don't work. So, yeah, dahlias, all of that kind of tropical stuff I used to grow a lot of, was very fashionable 2010, 11, 12.

Speaker 2: 13:39

But I've real sustainability queries around that. There's a lot of water. There's a lot of imported plants. There's a lot of water. There's a lot of water. There's a lot of imported plants, you know there's a lot of water. There's a lot of human resources used to dig them up, put them away, put them back in. There's a lot of peat. There's a lot of plastic. There's a lot of staking. There's a lot of watering.

Speaker 2: 14:00

You know, in the same way as growing even some roses, people shouldn't grow them. We can't grow some roses here because it's too wet. You know, in the same way as growing even some roses, people just can't grow them. We can't grow some roses here because it's too wet. You know the flowers get very badly bald, they get browned and get black spot and then people are spraying them and then they're saying why don't I have any insects in my garden? Well, because you sprayed them into oblivion. So I guess sustainability has become really important to me that you know I prefer to plant a Mahonia that will give me winter structure and feed pollinators in December and January, rather than a whole pile of dahlias.

Speaker 2: 14:34

Now, that's not to say I don't use dahlias, I do usually in pots, but I think you know we have to think about not just you what the plant is. You know where did it come from, who grew it? Um, you know how did those people get paid, how much water was used. You know how did it get here. Like when you look at supermarket plants, like their resource journey is huge. You know they've been grown. You know often abroad they've come in on trucks, on trolleys, to a distribution center, then they're driven to all over the country, then they're taken out, usually in bad condition, then they're maybe watered, then they die and then they get binned.

Speaker 1: 15:13

Yeah, it's funny. There's kind of two parallels there in what you're saying and they're very much tied in. So if you take, for example, the really nice, fresh-looking plant that's in a garden center or in a supermarket today and, as you say, it has been grown in Holland in temperature-controlled environment, it has come across the water in a temperature-controlled truck. It has all these resources that go into the back end of it to land that in front of you in pristine conditions so that when your eyes look at it you think this looks brilliant, this looks good. And then you pop it in your garden in the conditions that we've had and are having and will always have, because it's just the, just the nature of Ireland, and then very quickly, as in within days, it can look very, very shabby and I noticed so. So that ties into your sustainability piece, but it also ties into the what will work and what will be hardy and what will function and do well in in in an irish garden.

Speaker 1: 16:15

Yeah, and you mentioned it somewhere in the back of your book I think was a preferred plant supplier list, and you mentioned cat or Nursery, who I know are on the west coast of Ireland. They tend to grow quite hardy plants. I don't know them personally, so this is you know. I just know what people say about them, and what they say is that they grow a hardy plant that's fit for purpose and it may not look as pretty on day one as you know what comes off the shelf of a supermarket, because it hasn't been grown in that way but over the next 12, 24, five years that's definitely going to perform much better, and I suppose what you're seeing there is that there's a correlation between the two and it's important to be aware of that.

Speaker 2: 17:04

Yeah, like I'm a big fan of supporting small nurseries. Why? Because it's a sustainable thing to do. It's a small business. They're small businesses. They're doing their best.

Speaker 2: 17:21

So Carharty, mount Venus, kilmurry, kamolan, potting Shed, altamont, they're all businesses that are propagating a lot of their own stuff. They're all experts in their field. They know their plants well. They're keeping plants going and, as a gardener, it's the same as buying at a farmer's market. You're spending money that's going to stay in your local community. I think that's a sustainable way to spend money, first of all. Second of all, those plants are not coming from far away. Most of them are grown peat-free. It's low water, sometimes low plastic. So there's really interesting ways to think about how do I spend my money when I'm a gardener. If you look at, I mean, there's a really good nursery of odd and unusual and maverick left of center plant, vicks individual plants in Waterford. She's got a no plastic policy, she's got peat free, so you can get these really great plants from her and they're small plants. But that's what you should be buying. You should be buying small plants. But people go into the big garden centers and everything's looking amazing because they're fed and they come out of a greenhouse a week before and they're in full flower and the first thing a plant is going to do when you plant it in full flower is stop flowering. You so people go oh well, why did it die and why did it fall over? Because it's done. That's all a plant wants to do. It wants to flower.

Speaker 2: 18:54

So I rarely shop in those sort of places. I really kind of direct my clients not to shop there. And it's a real change. It's kind of like you have to kind of think about what is the plant? What am I asking the plant to do? And if you buy a really good, hardy, well-grown small plant from car hurley or mount venus or whoever it's, in a small one liter pot or even smaller, it's going to want to grow because it hasn't flowered yet.

Speaker 2: 19:26

Um, it looks a bit sad when you put it into the ground, but you know, six weeks later it doesn't. And at that point it's got its chance to put down roots, to get itself ready to flower, whereas something in flower or near to flower it doesn't have a chance to do that. Its growth is done and rarely will you get them to go through to the next year. So I don't like buying those plants. There are loads and loads of good plants. There are loads of good nurseries out there where you can get small plants, but they'll even do mail order. They have great plant lists. They know their plants inside out. They'll combine plants for you. They'll give you planting lists and we don't use them. You know, and those are really important things. So I would always try and choose from those nurseries. Um, if I could and it really.

Speaker 1: 20:12

It really is an education piece as well, like because people they assume that a plant that looks so vigorous on a given day is a really healthy plant, whereas one that might look like it needs to to get into the ground quickly looks like a non-healthy plant, but it's not actually the case and I think it's an education piece yeah, like I mean, people buy, let's say, penstemon in full flower in july.

Speaker 2: 20:39

They're done yeah they're not going to put down any more roots and no one's going to cut them back, like they should be, because they're in flower. Whereas if you you buy a little small one-litre penstemon from Cara Hurley today in April, by the end of June that'll be in full flower and you can take cuttings from it, you can propagate it, you can make your own penstemons. Whereas once a plant is in flower, it's kind of done what it needs to do. It doesn't want to do any more, so no, it needs to do. Yeah, it doesn't want to do anymore. So no matter how much you water it, you're still going to have some failure. Now, of course, you've got bedding, which you know does its thing for the summer, and that's a little bit different in that that will continue to flare.

Speaker 1: 21:17

But ultimately that's done as well yeah, we've gone slightly off topic, but it is an interesting and worthwhile topic as well. Yeah, to take it back to the book, so the the book is growing beauty, the reinvention of an irish country garden and, as I say, it takes you through the various seasons and of which you've kind of saying you've eight moments defined as as your seasons. Um, tell us about the book and you know the layout of it, how it works, because there's some brilliant, there's some brilliant. You know chapters within and you know the layout of it, how it works, because there's some brilliant. There's some brilliant. You know chapters within it.

Speaker 1: 21:50

You know nine favorite snowdrops leading into heli bores, the heroes of spring takes you up into summer. Nine plans for summer, magic, summer days with roses and autumn jewels, and so it's taking you through these windows of our moments as you've described them, and I assume that these were. You know, these were nice snapshots of that period of time and here's a plans list that kind of goes along with it. But you're you're actually saying that these can be mixed and matched together. So tell us about that and how it works.

Speaker 2: 22:22

Yeah, so so the idea of the book like I really like writing I really like I've always liked writing and I read a lot of books book like I really like writing, I really like I've always liked writing and I read a lot of books and you know I watch a lot of kind of films and stuff. So I was interested in doing two things. I was interested in making a film of the garden to kind of record the garden, because that's quite, it's quite nice to watch a film about gardening, so it's quite a nice few nice films out there about gardens. And the second thing was to write a book. Because I teach a little bit and I have clients who want to learn more and I think there's an appetite for that and I wanted to self-publish. I wanted to do a small run. My wife's a graphic designer so she did a terrific job on the on the graphics. Um, and I didn't, you know, I did. I want to write a book on just plants. Not really did I want to write a book on just plants? Not really Did. I want to write a book on garden design? Not really, because garden design is very specific about a garden, each garden.

Speaker 2: 23:15

So what I wanted to write a book about was about how I developed the garden and what challenges did I meet along the way and what do I now think is important. You know about gardening, having done probably that for 15 years. So if somebody with a new garden picked this up, what would they learn? So I wanted an element of seasonality spring, summer, autumn, winter and I wanted kind of the highlights of each of those seasons. And then I wanted a few chapters random chapters, if you like on, let's say, lightness, foliage, things that I think are really important. So there are a couple of things I think are really important considerations for any garden. It doesn't matter if it's new or old and that structure. If you don't have structure, you don't have anything. And I don't care how good prairie planting looks, it's still got no structure and it's still pretty boring in winter. So, and if you've got a very tropical garden where you're very dependent on summer color, it's also very boring in winter. So structure is really important and that can be steps, it can be gates, it can be clipped you, it can be beach hedges, it can be things that are there. So that's a really important thing.

Speaker 2: 24:24

Lightness is really important, because we use too many plants that are clunky and chunky foliage and lots of leaves and very little else and that can make a garden feel very gloomy, you know, and can feel very stuck when it could actually be a really nice space. So you know, grasses are really great for introducing lightness because they're see-through. Dogwoods, you know, anything that's reflective. Anything that's got good leaves is reflective. That's a really good thing for lightness. So light is lots of different things. It can be reflection on water, which is in the book. It can be see-through. It can be something that looks really great in the fog. It can be something that just has great big leaves that create a silhouette and create shade, because light is shade and light and dark.

Speaker 2: 25:10

And the last thing was foliage. You know foliage is such an important thing that we underestimate so many plants have really horrible foliage. There's lots of plants in the book. People say, oh, why isn't that initialized? Foliage isn't that great. You know, if you think of something like inulas a, of the asters, some of the phloxes, some of the companion lists, can be really clunky foliage and they just they're too big, they're quite shady, they fall in. I'm not really that fond of that. I want that see-through lightness there. So that was really what it was about.

Speaker 2: 25:49

And then the grids, as I call them, which are basically sets of nine plants. The idea with those is that you can look at the grid for foliage there's nine good plants, there's nine green plants, there's nine autumn plants, there's nine spring plants, there's nine snowdrops. You can kind of get a bit of a feel for what works with what, because they're all plants that I grow and they're all plants that grow with each other. So, you know, you could look at the snowdrops and say, okay, I'm going to pick two snowdrops from there, and you could look at the hellebores and you could pick something from that. You could get some good, evergreen foliage. Then you could get, you know, some autumn plants as well. So that's the whole idea is that there's a bit of a crossover where you can kind of look a bit like a salad bar for plants. You can pick what you want, you know yeah, and that sounds like a lovely concept.

Speaker 1: 26:39

And in doing that, in bringing your your plants from your different moments, as you call them, you're you're getting a garden that's going to have interest all year round, as opposed to you know, going in on and picking all your plants on a given day that look good, but then are designing a hot border you know hot summer border and then it looks brilliant for for four months of the year or less, if we get a really wet summer, and then it's abysmal for the rest of the year.

Speaker 1: 27:08

So you're adding these moments throughout the year and actually I think the, the autumn and winter garden, are seriously underutilized in ireland and they're actually. You know if you can get something with a bit of flower at this time of the year, in the winter time, in the early spring time, when things are a bit gloomy, you know weather-wise, and you look out and you spot these. You know whether it's the. You use some brilliant photographs in the book of photographs through the garden on a foggy day. Uh, you're, there's some brilliant photographs of that and that's a beautiful scene, something that would cheer you up a bit. But also the flower that you're talking about adding from these, you know the autumn jewels or the the winter flowers.

Speaker 2: 27:52

They add cheer at a time of year where it's badly needed, you know so yeah, I guess it's like it's funny when you talk about you know when borders are planted. I mean, there's a lot of garden designers out there who are not plants people. So often I will go and do a fix on those kinds of plantings where the structure's okay but the planting is not and you can really tell the month it was planted, because you're like, oh, this was planted in May because everything here flowers in May. They went to the wholesalers and they bought everything that was in flower in May and there's nothing that flowers afterwards. Or if they really stuck, they'll just put in loads of hydrangea annabelle, that's it, you know.

Speaker 2: 28:32

So a good planting takes three years to actually do properly, because you put in your good structure plants, you put in your plants through the year, you change it, the next year you put in bulbs and the third year you kind of put in the final layer. So I always say a good planting and I like to work with clients with that in mind, where I say we're going to get the basics of this planting really good this year, but next year we're going to add bulbs, the next year we're going to add a bit more structure and the next year we're going to add the final plants, and that makes it work, um. So yes, winter and autumn is six months of the year yeah and we don't pay enough attention to that.

Speaker 2: 29:12

So, like my garden in winter is great. I love it because the some of the pictures you'll see them. The grasses are brilliant, the clip dew is great. Um snowdrops are great. Um you know, you've got daphne, sarcococca, mahonia, viburnum, you've got all of these absolutely fantastic um plants that perform during the winter. We just don't use them yeah you know, yeah, that's this.

Speaker 2: 29:38

It's really important, it's really important for pollinators, it's really important for wildlife, but it's very important for your garden as well that you can go out, like you could have days in november where it's nice and crisp, and you go out and there's nothing in your garden as well, that you can go out like you could have days in November where it's nice and crisp and you go out and there's nothing in your garden. Um, and you know, if you've a big garden, you're not going to plant Daphne at the far end of it, where you have to trek down to see it. It should be beside your house. You should have Sarkicaca beside your house where you can get that smell of winter um, throughout. You know the really gorgeous scent throughout winter. So I think, I think that if we move away from the kind of summer color, instagrammable kind of plantings, it's much more interesting to do a garden that has things that work really well. You know, and often I'll I'll go around the garden, I'll say, okay, is there a Daphne? Is there Sarcococca? Is there Mahonia? And then I'll go is there snowdrops? Is there Narcissi? Have we got February Gold? Have we got Thalia? Have we got Mount Hood, those Narcissi.

Speaker 2: 30:39

And then what tulips have? We got Ballerina, spring Green. Then we got James. Then you got Euphorbia, some of the earlier grasses. Common Grass is Crab Forest or Overdam. That finishes Spring, james. Then you got Euphorbia, some of the earlier grasses, common grasses, crab Forest or Overdam. That finishes spring. And then you're into summer. You got your Dahlia, you got your Gladiola, you got you know, some of the Orangiums are really really good as well Cygnus, sorba, euphatorium, and then you're into Asters Noreens. Then you're into asters noreens, then you're into dogwoods and then you're into winter structure. And that's your calendar. And you don't do that in one year.

Speaker 1: 31:14

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:15

So, like each year with a client's garden or my own garden, I'd say, okay, what do I have to fix? I'm going to add more narcissite or I'm going to really focus on hellebores. So instead of buying one hellebore a year and buying loads of other plants, I said this spring I'm going to do loads more hellebores. So I'm going to put in 15 hellebores and that's hellebores done. And the next year they look great because they have a whole year to establish. I'm not constantly adding one all the time. Snowdrops I'm a big fan of just the normal nevalis. I just divide tons and tons of them. That makes you can see them in the book and you can see them in the film as well. That makes a whole carpet of snowdrops, which is a moment. Yeah, you know, that's from december until the end of february, and what?

Speaker 1: 31:58

you're talking about here is so a lot of people listening to the podcast are. You know they're? They're doing their own gardens, they're they're not getting a garden designer in and a lot of them will try to do that. They'll go, they'll go and they'll end up with their all their dahlias and their, their salvias and their asters and so on. And when sometimes you talk about garden design, it feels like it's unattainable for somebody doing it on their own. But what you're really talking about here is not. It's very much attainable for for anybody following fairly, fairly basic. Uh, I suppose templates of these are good performing plants that are at their peak in this moment and here's the next moment, and you just slot your plants together and over time, as you say, you spot an area that maybe needs a little bit of a revamp for next year and you add some. Or, if it's missing a moment at a certain time of the year, you come along with the plants from that moment and you add them in.

Speaker 2: 33:01

Yeah, and I'll utilise the best parts of the garden to give the best show. So you know there will be gardens and everybody will have parts of the garden where they aren't working. So you know, somebody says, oh, this corner is really awful, it's really dark and it's, you know, it's odd shape and it's clay. You know I'm saying, ok, well, we, you know, we put hydrangea somalia up the wall and we put one of the really good Clematis alpina. It's going to flower in early spring. We do some ferns, we put snowdrops through the ferns, we might put some Virginia and we might put some vinca. It's done. There's no summer color in that, it's just that's the north-facing corner. That looks really really well. If they've got acid soil you can put in some, you know, mechanopsis, nice blue poppies, um, you know, lily of the valley, polygonatum, things like that. That will really make it. So people, I think, get kind of overawed by this. You know I have to go out and keep buying stuff, but I think you're better to buy with intent and say you know, I'm going to do this year, I'm going to buy penstemons and I'm going to buy hellebores and I'm going to buy some good winter flowering shrubs. So I don't ever kind of go to nurseries for myself kind of like, oh, I'll go and see what I want, what might happen. I kind of go with a list. So I have a list always that I say, okay, I need some more. I don't sometimes know what it is for the corner. No, I need evergreen ground cover, 60 centimeters which are tolerant. I don't know. And then I work out of that. But really, the more I've worked with plants, I probably have a palette of about 150 plants that I know really, really, really well and those can all be interchanged. So sometimes a client will say what should I put here? I can kind of give them a planting list from my head because I know that they all work with each other. Yes, but yeah, you're right, that is for clients or for gardeners who are listening. It's a jigsaw, that's all you're doing, you know, and part of the jigsaw is spring, part of the jigsaw is early summer, part of the jigsaw is late summer. Part of the jigsaw is autumn, winter, when you put it all together within a frame. That's your garden and there'll be bits missing in the garden where, like I walk into gardens ago where are the snowdrops? Why isn't there a daphne here. Why has the garden stopped looking good in july? Because you've no late summer color, because you've no asters, you've no noreens, you've no dahlias. You know you've, yeah.

Speaker 2: 35:43

Um, so the things like annuals day is some of the annual bulbs, um winter annuals, like maybe cyclamen or violas, they're just accents, they're not the thing you know, they're just like make it look a bit, a bit better. Um, I did some planting recently for a client um they were. It was a holiday home, very nice house, and we got some really big pots. We put in some really good fatsia, some really good variegated um ivs and we put in some cyclamen gum and some small skimia, some carex, a couple of different carex and big pots, and that has kept them perfectly through the winter.

Speaker 2: 36:39

Into that we put in tulip ballerina and spring green, put in some baby narcissite the little small ones like a tet or something like that, maybe a couple of thalia, and that will get them right through into May. Then you put in some taller bedding. You might put in cosmos into that. So you're like that's a very sustainable thing. All those plants are looking good. You're not moving everything at the same time, so you're really it's a jigsaw and you're popping things in and taking things out. But that's once. You have that structure in that pot, and it's the same with a garden you change things in it.

Speaker 1: 37:18

So the annuals essentially are like the makeup, yeah, so it's just a little bit of blusher to make the thing look good on a given day, or you know, if you think about doing up a sitting room, you're doing up a sitting room.

Speaker 2: 37:31

annuals are the cushions on the couch.

Speaker 1: 37:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 37:34

You know you change them all the time you move them around you change a different colour. But when I take out summer bedding from that in late September, october, I'm going to pop in heathers, spring bulbs, cyclamen, violas, something like that, and the central structure stays the same. They need to tidy up, but all those plants are pretty drought tolerant and in that case the challenge was we put in 12 planters, six on both sides, quite big. They look fantastic, but you're not constantly emptying them for summer colour and then you're going back and emptying them for winter colour. The bones stay the same and then you accent change the other bits.

Speaker 1: 38:20

Yeah, for sure. The book, as I say, is beautiful and it takes you through. The film is slightly different. So, as you mentioned, off air with a book, as I say, is beautiful and it takes you through, the film is slightly different. So, as you mentioned, off air with a book, you're using a lot of pictures, and a lot of fantastic pictures, and some of them are your own and some of them, I think, are from different photographers. But with a film, you're capturing these moments that you talk about, but maybe you're seeing the stages, as opposed to the photograph, which gives you that one singular moment, you know.

Speaker 2: 38:53

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:55

So I love film. I go to. I go to films all the time. It doesn't matter what film is, I'll watch a film I like.

Speaker 2: 39:03

So I kind of realized recently enough that actually what I'm after in a garden is not a great garden, this set of plants. It's creating an atmosphere and plants do that. You know. You use loads of white plants, you create a peaceful and serene atmosphere. You use loads of colorful plants, it becomes more racy and it becomes more exciting. Um, so plants help you create the atmosphere. Obviously the structure helps as well.

Speaker 2: 39:32

Um, so I kind of became interested in atmosphere and I visit a lot of historic gardens and I do a lot in the UK as well and I'm always struck by this is a garden that's 200 years old and the atmosphere is phenomenal. You know, just got it. It's just our quality beautiful garden. There's very little planting in it, you know. So there's those good gardens. So I started becoming interested in atmosphere. And what does this garden feel like? You know, does it feel too much?

Speaker 2: 40:03

I go to a lot of garden, more modern gardens, and it's just they're overwhelming because they try to get everything in. You know, there's a water feature and there's a set of steps and there's a road around this and there's road around that and there's quite different colored benches and there's a pink seat in the middle of the tulips, and there's this and this and it's just so much stuff. And all of those things on their own are brilliant, and when you separate them out and use less of them, it makes them more powerful, because it's it's often very hard to see lots of things in one garden. So for me, atmosphere is about just having enough things that keep you interested. And the film I wanted to make it over the last it's been shot over the last four years just to capture that atmosphere.

Speaker 2: 40:50

You know that this is what the grasses look like in winter. You know they're burnt ochre and there's verbascum up in front of them and that's coal, black and charcoal colored, and you can certainly create that in an image, but it's static. So I just thought it'd be interesting for people to experience the two things. Um, and that's why you know, hopefully the film is only about 35 minutes, but it follows four seasons and you can kind of get a sense of, you know what the garden is really like without visiting it from the film in a different way than you can from the book.

Speaker 2: 41:27

So the book is great as a reference and books are great as references, but not being seeing. You know what does a hellebore really look like with those snowdrops, with that viburnum behind it, because you can see it in full colour and the light is changing and the plants are moving, so it gives it much more sense of movement and sense of lightness. So that was the important thing and making the film was. You know it was tricky because it was like five hours of footage for 30 minutes right so you know we to chop a lot, but I'm really happy with both of them.

Speaker 2: 42:00

But they're two different things but they're still nice. I'll hopefully have the film up on my website after the book launch and people can watch it there. I just, you know, I like to share kind of what I like, um. So, yeah, the book the book is a different thing than the film. The book is reference um thing than the film. The book is reference. The photographs are beautiful. I'm really happy with them and all the photographers who worked on them should take a bow. They were great. But it's a different thing and I should also say, like the book.

Speaker 2: 42:31

You know, I had a very good idea of what it should be, but I didn't really know what I was going to gonna. You know how the final product was going to look like. I was really lucky to come across, um, a friend, candida, uh, firth McDonald who's, who actually lives in Kilkenny and she's got loads of experience in editing and she was actually the person who came in and really made that thing, made shape of it, you know, and she asked great questions. She was like why do you think that and what do you think about that kind of garden and why do you think that works and why that doesn't work? And you know, working with her on it was just a brilliant experience because she shaved off the bits that didn't matter and she made the bits that did matter better.

Speaker 1: 43:17

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 43:20

She's like a really good producer kind of person and she just has a great knowledge of plants as well, so she's a pleasure to work with and the book wouldn't be. I love collaborations like that, because the book wouldn't be as good if she hadn't done that and the same with the film Alan the filmmaker. I let him do his thing, because that's what he does.

Speaker 1: 43:38

The book is because it starts out where it's. It's kind of an origin story of, of your garden, and it starts out as a bit of an origin story both of yourself and of the garden, but then it's sort of it morphs then into like a very good guidebook of you know these how to, not how to but you have the blocks of color for the moments of the year and then how they can be married together and then very, very practically the this bulletproof plant list that you have and you have those you know in various sections across the across the book and I think it it it marries two kind of different concepts together really well yeah, I, I guess I just want to save people from trekking around trying to find plants to make your garden look good.

Speaker 2: 44:29

Um, you don't have to do that. You can just, you know, have faith in in these plants and then you grow these plants and find these plants. And it's a bit of an adventure finding plants, it's not a job. You know, driving to Cairo early is great, because they're super enthusiastic, and Mount Venus are great. You can ask questions and they'll say that will work with that and that will work with that. But you're going to also lose plants along the way. You're going to kill plants. They're not going to survive. That's just part of it. That's failure.

Speaker 2: 44:59

I mean, it's like being a parent. You don't always get it right. You know you make mistakes and you do your best and hopefully your kids turn out okay. And it's the same with your garden. You know you just have to learn by mistakes. Hopefully you don't make too many mistakes.

Speaker 2: 45:14

But like I lose plants all the time and I kind of, why did I lose that? And I realized, oh okay, you know it's whatever, but that yeah. So there, it does morph in that sense that people want to know how did you start becoming a gardener, you know, and I'm self-taught, so there was no kind of how I became, it was just happened because of country, um, and then it does morph into this really nice piece of hope, um, about the importance of gardening and about the importance of considering structure, foliage, lightness, texture, um, as important elements of a garden. And then, you know, hopefully uniting those lessons in these plants. You know these plants will all work, but people, yeah, people try too much, too quick.

Speaker 2: 46:06

I think with gardening You're better off really understanding. You know, when I say full sun, that is actually what that means. It's not a north-facing border, even if you want it to be. Plants is not going to live there. If you're on sticky clay and you want to grow Daphne, well, you better change the clay a little bit, because Daphne's not going to like that, and the reason why is because it comes from high-mountain habitats with perfect drainage. It doesn't like its roots cold, and so once you learn those kind of fundamentals like what soil have I? What aspect is it? You know, is my soil sticky or is it well drained? Is that north, is that south, is that east, is that west? Once you get that, then you know. Then you start to pick plants for that. But people will often say you know what can? Oh, what can I, what can I put on this bed? And I'm like what? What direction does it face? And they're like I have no idea yeah well, there's a full sun, you know.

Speaker 2: 47:10

And if it isn't full sun, what? How much morning sun does it get? Because that matters for plants.

Speaker 2: 47:15

You give plant what it wants, it'll grow yeah, so it's back to it's right plant, right place and it's I'm not sure who the original original betchato was the person who said that, and she was right, because if you don't give a plant where it doesn't want it what it wants, it it'll, it'll soak, it won't do well, it'll be weak. You know and I think a prime thing about that is roses people try and shoehorn them into beds where they don't work too much shade. They grow the wrong ones and they fail and then people get give up on gardening and that's a real pity. So in in the case of roses, there's probably 10 roses I use all the time. Six of them are in the book and they're kind of you know. They're ones that are very, very, very, very good plants that are always and always, always, going to survive and grow well, you know, but there's lots that don't yeah, and your your plants list.

Speaker 1: 48:21

So, as I said, after the last episode where we spoke, people were were saying they listened back several times to write all the notes, but the the plants lists in in your book are very comprehensive. So there's all the grasses are listed. Then filling, filling out these moments. You have your hellebores, your snowdrops, narcissi plants for high summer, you know. So there's loads of windows with different plants lists for it and that'll help you, you know that'll help you. I suppose, pull the whole thing together. The book itself it's self-published. How was that Tough process?

Speaker 2: 48:56

Yeah, really good. Just on the plant list. The plant list, I wrote it and I said if I was moving house, what plants would I take? And that's the criteria. If I had to go to a smaller garden, what would I take, what would I absolutely make sure I had? And that's pretty much what I would want. Self-publishing it was, it was. It was fine. I, I love writing, I wrote, I write a lot, um, I read a lot, so I kind of knew what I wanted to say. So it wasn't a chore. I wrote it pretty quickly but I had a good idea of the structure. As I said, candida came in and really, you know, really helped fine-tune that my wife is a graphic designer. She did a super job on it and you know we've we've worked together on enough things that we don't disagree. So I actually started writing it, the book. I only started writing the book in December of last year and I finished it, done and dusted, in January, the end of January. So I wrote and designed it in about five weeks.

Speaker 1: 50:02

Wow.

Speaker 2: 50:03

I just knew what I wanted to say. I had kind of sample chapter headings worked out. I knew what I wanted to look like I had. The biggest problem was the images, just finding what image best represents this and do people want to see more gardens or do they want to see more of this? But the writing wasn't a problem. The design wasn't a problem.

Speaker 2: 50:20

Candida came in and really, really tidied it at the end and then we self-published through character print in Ireland. So I wanted to do it with an Irish company and they were superb. And I think, like self-publishing is kind of scary because you don't have a publisher doing stuff. I don't have a distributor, so I'm kind of reliant on people hearing about the book and wanting to buy it. I didn't do a massive print run, but it's still a pretty substantial cost. So, yeah, I, you know, if, if, if, people buy it, I'd be really happy because they're like maybe another one, but I do think it's a good book. Like I'm, I kind of wrote it and said you know, if I was me 10 years ago, what kind of book would I want?

Speaker 2: 51:04

yeah you know, and this is hopefully that book um, there's probably another book out there where you could do more plant, you know what works with what and that kind of thing, and that might be another book for me in the future because I'm interested in that. But yeah, the concept of putting a book together is kind of scary because at some point you have to leave stuff out. There's loads of other things I could have said, but I wanted it to be personal. I wanted it to be you know, how did I arrive at gardening? I arrived at gardening because I, you know, really, really suffering with depression and that's.

Speaker 2: 51:41

That's a massive thing to talk about now. And it's so important because people don't you know, people avoid talking about mental health. But that was the reason I got into gardening, because I just was so at a loose end, like nothing really going on. I didn't know if I was going to get better. My doctor was absolutely brilliant, you know, really helped me and I had a really great psychotherapist. But that process of getting better was really helped by being a gardener. You know, it was really helped by going out there.

Speaker 2: 52:12

And I'm not saying gardening cures depression or anything like that, but I'm saying that it's important. It's important that you know there's lots of analogies between life and gardening. You know there's failure and being able to fix and being. You know rupture and repair, as they call it in psychotherapy, being able to have good self-talk and being able to fail and be happy about failure. So I think that's that was one of the great learnings for me about gardening that you know with gardening you can fail all the time and still feel like you're successful yeah, it's, it's so this is not the first time it has come up on the podcast.

Speaker 1: 52:48

We actually didn't speak about about this as as kind of your origin or your entry into gardening the last time we spoke at all and so this is kind of the first time it has come up from from your perspective as as we talk, but several times on the podcast with various guests it has come up that you know they have come into to to gardening from some aspect of mental health.

Speaker 1: 53:13

The most, the most recent one of those was Anna Lytton, back the Garden Fairy, and you know she mentioned that that was her entry. And several others you know over the course of the last couple of years have said that the gardening can be a learning for life in that it's something you know. You saw your seedlings or whatever and they die and you just move on and you saw your next batch and it kind of, as you say, rupture, rupture and repair it. There is that element of it and I think everybody goes through that. But it's. It's interesting that it's coming up regularly enough that people are entering, you know, gardening on the back of some mental health issue or other yeah, I think, like I think a lot of people go into creative stuff.

Speaker 2: 54:09

I think a lot of people go to music, a lot of people go into the arts on the basis of they're looking for a state change. Yeah, they're not happy with whatever. Like I had had a corporate, like I'd had before that I'd had a. I've been a goldsmith for a number of years. I had a car crash with an injury which I meant I couldn't do that anymore. I went back and I did a master's in business strategy because that's what I was interested in and corporate life was not for me, you know.

Speaker 2: 54:35

And and that's a really difficult thing because you've got young kids, you've got a mortgage, you've got all these things and I think there's different challenges mentally and so you know, when you're in your 30s and you've lost, you can't work because of that. It's a really lonely place and no matter how many campaigns you see about, you know it's good to talk and it's good to do this and it's good to talk and it's good to do this and it's good to reach out and all the rest. People are not comfortable talking about mental health, just not, because they don't know what to say and actually there is nothing you can say you could, just.

Speaker 2: 55:06

All you have to do is be there yeah yeah, and it's the weirdest thing that once people realize that's, actually all you need to do is turn up and have a cup of tea or go garden or whatever. So I'm not surprised that people find gardening as an entry, because once you realize that gardening is a reflection of life in a way that you know you lose, as you said. You lose seedlings, things fall over, things rot, things die. You have some success, you have sunny days, but you know, like to be a gardener is to be hopeful, like you've.

Speaker 2: 55:45

You look outside today and it's absolutely saturated, but it doesn't really bother me so much because I know that.

Speaker 2: 55:53

You know there'll be days when I'm, like you know, going in for a drink of water. It's too hot, yeah, yeah, I think I see it coming up a number of times, certainly when I teach that people. They know that they need to garden and they know they need to get out to garden, but they don't know why. Um, but it's really important, I think it's, it's in our subconscious, it's a really important thing for us to be out in the earth and the other studies there that's, you know, people putting their hands in the soil and being gardening um have lower rates of depression. I mean, there's, there's the, the good microbiome piece with soil. That's a really important piece of research where it shows that, that that connection is really important for our health. And like, like, since we've talked in 2021, we've had, you know, a war, a good bit of climate change, and we've post-COVID, you know. I mean, how much more can you fit into three years? It's no wonder people are looking for an answer that's outside of themselves.

Speaker 1: 56:53

That's not work you know, yeah, and it's again again I mentioned it on the podcast recently nature, the garden, it's, it's a, it's constant, it's a leveler. Yeah, so we talk about you mentioned the gut microbiome and like that is seriously underrated, generally speaking in population and certainly with children. It's completely underrated. Now we're going very off topic in relation to the book, but it's still. It's still quite an important thing that it is so important for kids, you know, for all of us, to get our hands dirty, to connect with the art.

Speaker 1: 57:32

There's the, there's the good microbiome piece, but there's also the actual earthing, the there's the, the good microbiome piece, but there's also the actual earthing. So by touching the soil, touching the ground, touching the trees, if that's, if that's your thing, you're actually bringing your, your body to a vibration that matches the earth and that that sort of calms everything. Where, as you say, you're dealing with know, pandemics and wars and climate change and whatever else outside of it, the nature itself just levels everything and settles everything, and it really is important from that point of view.

Speaker 2: 58:05

Yeah, gardens. You know, like I said in my book, garden doesn't care, gardens don't care if there's a war or a pandemic, gardens just get on with it. Nature gets on with it as best as it can, despite what we do to it. And that's, you know, for me, when I was really really finding it very, very difficult, I learned. You know, I did a lot of meditation because my doctor was, like you know, go and learn mindfulness. And that was probably the first time I learned to sit in my garden and actually not do anything.

Speaker 2: 58:33

You know, like you say, that just levels everything down, it slows down your breathing, it gets you connected in a different way than any other activity. You know, because most of the other stuff is doing and you can garden without doing much doing. You know it can be reading, it can be an hour's reading, it can be cutting back something it could be doing. You know it's work, but it's good work. You know that makes sense. So I think that was yeah. So what is the book? The book is a bit about why did I come to gardening, how did I come to gardening, what's important in gardening, why do we garden? And if we are going to garden, what plants should we garden with?

Speaker 1: 59:13

yeah, brilliant. It really is beautiful looking book. Looking forward to seeing it in the coming weeks and I know I know you can buy it from your website, so I'll put the link in the show notes. But just tell people about your website, what, where they can buy it and anything else that they need to know around that yeah, perfect.

Speaker 2: 59:29

So it's um, it's wwwgardenfablecom and you can buy the book there and it's 30 euros plus postage seven euros in Ireland. Or you can do click and collect. If you're I'm in Kilkenny but I'm you could, you could collect. I am working with a number of bookshops trying to get it stocked there, so do reach out if you're not, if you don't want to do that, and I can do it. And yeah, I'll also have it on sale for my courses which are starting in may, so if you're on one of my courses, you'll be able to buy it directly as well yeah, and again, all your courses are on the website, so I'll put the link to that in the show notes and anyone that's interested there.

Speaker 1: 1:00:06

Just looking at the book, it's it's 30 euros plus posters. It's seriously good money well spent, because if you start picking these plants, you know, in the combinations that are mentioned in the book, it it really will make your garden sing for all these moments throughout the year, and I think that's you know, that's really really important. So there's, it's been a fascinating chat. Again, I know a lot of people will have their pens out. They they don't need to just have their pen out, though, because the book will will outline a lot of these plants, and it's been a great pleasure having you on again and thank you very much for coming on. Master my Garden podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:00:42

Thanks so much, John.

Speaker 1: 1:00:44

So that's been this week's episode. Huge thanks to Des coming on Fascinating chat. We went in different directions there, various directions that I actually didn't expect to go, but they're all really important, you know, in terms of the garden and and what it can do for you, but also the you know the practical piece around choosing plants, combining plants. The book is a really, really good guide for that. Fantastic photography in it as well, like beautiful, as, as that says, beautiful moments within the garden, and they're all captured brilliantly and there's a sort of a template as to how you can do that and match those for your own garden. So, yeah, super, super chat. That's been this week's episode. Thanks for listening and until the next time, happy gardening, thank you.