Designing a bright future

GLDA members did extremely well at Bloom this year

Patricia Tyrrell, Chairperson of the Garden and Landscape Designers Association, looks back on a momentous year for its members and how the association has grown

Landscape

31 August 2016

Once again we are delighted to be part of GLAS, the garden and landscape amenity showcase, a valuable social network and always a relaxed and sociable event with the opportunity to meet old friends and hopefully make many new ones

The Garden and Landscape Designers Association (GLDA) represents some of Ireland’s leading garden and landscape designers in Ireland, and its growing membership provides a comprehensive range of landscape and garden design services nationwide.

We also provide ongoing training opportunities in various aspects of design, practical workshops and field trips to gardens and nurseries, and our highly acclaimed annual international design seminar.

We would be delighted to welcome you at our stand and discuss membership options. Whether you are an established garden designer or a product/service provider, membership of the GLDA has many benefits. For suppliers and service providers to the GLDA ,we have a Corporate Membership category which through listings on our website creates links between suppliers and designers.

Our category of pre-registered membership offers practising designers a progressive program leading to full membership. Applicants are supported during this process with a series of continuing professional development workshops, portfolio classes and through ongoing support from a panel of established members. Through our pre- registered membership we are delighted to welcome three new members- Elizabeth O’Connell based in Laois, Kevin Dennis from Dublin and Janet Hawker based in Kerry.

As always its been a busy year for the GLDA. Our annual Seminar ‘Ebb & Flow’ was held in February with speakers from India, China, the Netherlands and the UK. This year the GLDA celebrates its 20^th anniversary and very appropriately our seminar was one of the most successful and thought provoking held to date and a rare opportunity to get an insight into the global flow of ideas and influences in landscape design, past, present and future.

To commemorate our 20^th Anniversary we also brought out a special edition of Compass, looking back at past articles and events.

Our members once again have been active at Bloom. Our series of garden design talks and free design advice sessions given by Full Members were very well received, as was our competition to win a beautiful Japanese Acer (winner to be announced soon) kindly sponsored by Yellow Furze Nursery. We would like to sincerely thank all our volunteer members and Administrator, for their generous support of our exhibition stand

We also especially wish to acknowledge, and warmly congratulate our members who designed award winning show gardens this year. They are:

Ingrid Swan MGLDA, for her garden ‘Sculpture in the Parkland’, which received a ‘Silver-Gilt’ award.
Tunde Szentesi GLDA Pre-Reg, for her garden ‘Out the Other Side – A Garden of Hope’, which received a ‘Silver-Gilt’ award.
Oliver & Liat Schurmann GLDA Pre-Reg, for their two gardens. ‘The Designer’s Back Yard’, which received a ‘Gold’ award, and ‘The Legend of Tarzan’, which also received a ‘Gold’ award!
Padraic Woods GLDA Pre-Reg, for his garden ‘Sharing the Load’, which received a ‘Bronze’ award.

The committee and wider community of Friends and Pre-registered members put in a lot of voluntary time and effort for the GLDA which we very much appreciate. A lot of this effort is aimed at raising awareness in Ireland of the value of good design. Our focus on education and the passing on of information between members allow us to grow, not just as an organisation, but to grow in the sense of developing our design skills. Good design is about life- long learning, striving to improve and ultimately deliver the very best end result.