More speakers confirmed for this month’s GLDA seminar

Multi-award-winning RHS Chelsea Flower Show landscape designer and horticulturist Taina Suonio will deliver a talk

Landscape

9 February 2023

Multi-award-winning RHS Chelsea Flower Show landscape designer and horticulturist Taina Suonio will deliver a talk at the GLDA seminar later this month. The title of Suonio ‘s presentation is “From Finnish Novice to Award Winning Chelsea Designer – Two Decades of Passion.”

The annual GLDA seminar 2023 entitled ‘Letting Nature In – Listening to the rhythm of nature and capturing its essence in the designed landscape’, will take place on 25th February 2023 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Santry, Dublin. Tea and coffee and a soup and sandwiches lunch will be provided.

In 2019 Suonio came to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show as the first ever Finnish designer and first ever Nordic female designer. She was awarded a Silver-gilt for her garden The Roots in Finland Kyrö Garden. In 2021 her Finnish Soul Garden got Silver-gilt. The garden’s two large black granite boulders were relocated in the RHS Wisley Science Garden. In 2022 her Connected, by EXANTE garden was awarded Silver-gilt. It will be relocated to the roof garden of the University College Hospital in London.

She is also a tv and radio presenter and researcher in the Fifth Dimension – Vegetated Roofs in Urban Areas research group of the University of Helsinki, and lectures and writes articles on matters related to horticulture, landscaping and the environment.

Suonio was Chair of the working group on Vegetated Roof Strategy for the City of Vantaa (2022). She is the co-initiator and landscape designer of the Greenest of the Green internationally awarded block of flats (121) project in Helsinki, completed in 2017. One of her current projects, is a major housing development Kurkimoisio in Helsinki, comprising five blocks of flats.

Her recent international designs include the City of Vantaa Diversity Park Garden (Jinan, China,2021), London’s Pantechnicon’s roof garden and indoor plant design (2020) and TT-Liquor-Bar Roof Garden (2019). At present as member of a design team for a major roof garden in Japan.

The GLDA is an organisation for garden designers, horticulturists and landscape designers. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in gardens or garden design.

Organised in association with Bord Bia, the event will host several speakers who will examine why we should be making space for nature in our gardens and the benefits of doing so. Other speakers confirmed to date include: Randal Plunkett of Dunsany Estate, Mary Reynolds and Barry Kavanagh.

Pricing for tickets, which are available to purchase online, is as follows: