Landscape designers compete in RTÉ’s Super Garden

Jenny McGovern

Super Garden returned to RTÉ 1 last Thursday for a brand new series in which five up-and-coming designers compete to showcase their garden at this year’s 2014 Bloom Festival and this year there’s a Cavan contestant on board.
The show will follow each designer from the initial concept and design stage, to pitching their idea to the Super Garden judges, through the reality of the construction process and then the completion of their Super Garden. With just weeks to design and build a show garden, and a budget of just €5,000, the challenges that will face these promising designers will unfold throughout the series.

Homeowners’ specifications

Each garden designer works on a garden and to a brief given to them by the residents. Mindful of their budget, the designer must design a garden to the homeowners’ specifications. All five have been given similar size gardens to work with, but each has a very different brief, and certainly very different design approaches. This Thursday will see Ballymachugh native Padraig Kelly (26) grace our screens as he creates a garden, which showcases purely native Irish plants - his mission is to show the best of Irish horticulture by using guaranteed Irish plants in a woodland paradise. A landscape gardener by trade Padraig said he “thoroughly enjoyed” the experience.

Stunning location
The winner of Super Garden will be revealed in the sixth and final episode of the series, when all the designers and judges gather at the stunning location of Powerscourt House in Wicklow. The prize will be awarded to the designer voted Super Garden designer 2014, and with it the life-changing opportunity to re-create their design at the prestigious Bloom 2014 and the possibility of pursuing a career in professional garden design.