Small Talk with garden designer – Diarmuid Gavin
One of Ireland’s most well-known garden designers, Giarmuid Gavin talks about creativity, resilience, and his award-winning career
Print9 April 2026
In association with Gardenworld Nurseries
At Growtrade, we’re running an interview series titled ‘Small Talk’, where we talk to various influential members of Ireland’s horticulture trade.
This week’s conversation is with one of Ireland’s most well-known and well-loved garden designers – Diarmuid Gavin.
How did you first get involved in the horticulture sector?
When I left school I knew I wanted to do something creative and practical. I thought it might be gardening, although for a while I also considered becoming a chef and started working in a restaurant in Dublin’s Temple Bar. I was about to begin formal training, when a job came up as a sales assistant in a shop called Mackey’s Seeds on Mary Street in the city.
Mackey’s was a real horticultural institution. The business had traded in different locations in the city since the 1700s and supplied seeds, plants and all sorts of horticultural supplies to gardeners across Dublin and beyond. We dealt with everyone from suburban gardeners to farmers. I remember one day Peter O’Toole came in looking for native Irish seeds for a wildflower meadow he wanted to sow. At the time none were available, though happily that has changed since.
I spent three wonderful years working there. I made friends for life among the staff and learned an enormous amount about plants and the gardening world. After that I went on to study at the College of Amenity Horticulture in the Botanic Gardens in Dublin, which gave me a solid grounding in horticulture and confirmed that I had chosen the right path.
What was one of the proudest moments in your career to date?
The proudest moments are often the quiet ones. Every now and then someone working in the gardening industry will tell me that they were inspired to garden, grow or design, because they read one of my books or watched a television series I made.
The gardening world is full of passionate people. It can be tough and it certainly is not for the faint hearted, but it attracts people who really care about what they do. To occasionally meet someone who tells me that something I created helped spark their interest in plants or gardens is always a real thrill.
What was one of the greatest challenges you’ve faced in your career to date?
Without question it was creating my first garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1995. At that time the show was not nearly as well known as it is now and it was not particularly open to bold or unusual ideas.
I remember the show manager, Mavis Sweetingham, explaining that I would need about £60,000 to build a garden. I arrived in London with £300 in my pocket, no tools, no equipment and nowhere to live. I had a collection of plants that had been dug out of people’s gardens and gathered in a farmyard in County Kerry, and a pile of stone in a yard in Dublin that I hoped to use to build a castellated tower. I had no clear way of getting either of them across the Irish Sea.
I had three weeks and three days to make it happen or return home with my tail between my legs. Somehow it came together, but at the time it felt like an enormous risk. Looking back now it was a formative moment that shaped everything that followed in my career.
Could you give us an example of a recent success you had in your work?
Recently I have been working with the Brian Friel Trust, Donegal County Council and members of the Friel family to create a garden around the house in Glenties where Brian Friel set his play “Dancing at Lughnasa”, which later became a film starring Meryl Streep.
It has been a wonderful project. I worked with a great team of landscapers and with members of the Trust to explore how the landscape around the house could be interpreted as a garden. One of the highlights was spending a weekend there with some of Ireland’s most talented actors when we officially launched the garden. It has been a very rewarding collaboration and the story of the garden continues to develop.
What are the greatest challenges facing the industry today?
One of the biggest challenges is the move towards more sustainable gardening. The nursery and garden centre industries have been slow to move fully into peat free composts and that transition still requires a lot of work and innovation. We also rely too heavily on chemicals in gardening, whether that is for feeding plants or controlling growth, and I think the industry will need to rethink that approach in the years ahead.
From a design perspective there is another challenge. Garden design has become quite homogenised internationally. We are all looking at the same gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show, reading the same magazines, watching the same television programmes and listening to the same voices at symposiums around the world. As a result many gardens begin to look similar. I would love to see more originality and a stronger sense of place in our gardens, in the same way that our storytellers, filmmakers, poets and musicians manage to express something distinctive about where they come from.
What are the greatest opportunities facing the industry today?
The horticultural industry is full of opportunity. As artificial intelligence becomes more present in many areas of work, people are beginning to realise that practical skills are incredibly valuable. Electricians, plumbers, builders, engineers and gardeners may well be some of the most sought after and well paid professions of the future.
There are also huge opportunities in craft gardening and landscape work. As Ireland becomes more environmentally aware there will be increasing demand for well designed parks, gardens and landscapes that work not only for people, but also for wildlife and biodiversity. Creating spaces that bring those things together will be an important part of the industry in the years ahead.
What advice would you give to someone just starting their career?
Have fun and work hard. Talk to other gardeners, ask questions and learn from the people around you. Try to understand what it is about gardening that really excites you and follow that instinct.
Travelling can be incredibly valuable as well. It broadens your mind and your experience. If there is a nursery or a garden design studio anywhere in the world that you admire, try to find a way to work there, even for a short time. Write to them, knock on the door and keep asking until someone lets you in. Once you are there, make yourself useful and learn everything you can.
Then bring that knowledge back and apply it to your own work. Mostly though I would say well done for choosing horticulture. It is a career where the rewards never really stop. As a gardener you learn practical skills, but you also develop a deep awareness of the natural world. You notice the seasons, the changing light, the warmth of the sun and the importance of the soil beneath your feet.
What are your hopes for the future of Irish horticulture?
After many years working abroad I returned to Ireland to discover a wonderful new generation of gardeners. There are talented young people being trained in colleges, working on estates, setting up their own nurseries and building careers in gardening.
Our craft gardening culture is thriving and it is being driven by people who genuinely love growing plants. They understand that through plants, gardens and the natural world around us, we can find enormous enjoyment and a real connection with the environment we live in.
My hope is that this energy continues to grow and that Irish horticulture develops even greater confidence in its own identity. We have a unique landscape, climate and cultural tradition. If we nurture that, Irish gardening will continue to flourish in its own distinctive way.
Small Talk is produced in association with Gardenworld Nurseries, one of the country’s leading wholesale plant nurseries, specialising in high-quality specimen trees, hedging, shrubs, and perennials.
Read more: Small Talk
© 2026, Growtrade.ie by Patryk Goron
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