Irish garden designer – Peter Donegan wins prestigious international award

Peter Donegan is an international and local landscape architect / garden designer and speaker based in Dublin, Ireland

Peter Donegan received a silver award at the APLD International Landscape Design Awards 2025, which is hosted by the Association of Professional Landscape Designers in the US

Landscape

19 November 2025

The Dublin based landscape architect, Peter Donegan received a silver award at the APLD International Landscape Design Awards 2025, which is hosted by the Association of Professional Landscape Designers in the US.

The APLD International Landscape Design Awards Program is a juried competition that recognises the top landscape designers in the United States and around the world.

This year it honoured Donegan’s show garden, “A Moment in Time”, which was on display at the 2024 Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show.

The garden, created by Semken Landscaping in collaboration with Yards Landscaping, portrays the tale of an Air Force veteran, who returns to a location he had wanted to call home.

The piece, which took nine days to complete, received a silver medal and the people’s choice award at the Melbourne exhibition.

The idea for the garden, which features a fragmented path winding to an aged, grassed roof wood cabin and a Piper PA-28 Cherokee aircraft, came along during Donegan’s time designing the gardens at 13th Century Château de Péronne in France and the Irish World War 1 centenary peace garden.

Through collaboration with the Australian construction team, the design evolved to be set in South-Eastern Australia in the early 1980s and highlighted the difficulties some veterans may face when returning to their former lives or when trying to create a new path post-service in the Air Force.

Whilst this garden portrays an Australian setting, the obstacles and struggles veterans may face are shared by their counterparts across the world.

The garden was created in support of the Defence Force Welfare Association (DFWA)whose purpose is to promote and protect the interests of serving and former members of the Australian Defence Force and their families.

At the APLD International Landscape Design Awards judges described the piece as “a very symbolic garden for people who served in the military”.