A new collaboration with Terence Conran puts Diarmuid Gavin among the high kings of design. As well as this book, he has a new magazine, radio and television commitments and projects as far away as South Africa. Louise Eastcatches up with the ever- growing gardener from Templeogue
When Diarmuid Gavin first went to London, at the age of 20, his mother's only request was that he go to Habitat and buy her a chopping board. He lugged it all the way around London, then home on the Holyhead ferry. "She took one look at it and said it was too big. I told Terence Conran that story over dinner last night," Gavin says with a laugh. As a garden designer, television presenter - of Home Front on the BBC and I Want a Garden on RTÉ, among others - and, increasingly, an all-round media personality, Gavin has hit the big time. You might even call him the Gordon Ramsay of gardening. But he is a little incredulous to find himself the co-author, with Conran, of a chunky coffee-table book called Outdoors. "He's always been a bit of an icon, someone I would have had an awestruck awareness of for a long time," Gavin says about the design guru. "His publishers rang and said: 'Unless we deliver you for dinner tomorrow, there'll be hell to pay.' I thought, Jesus, it's only me."
Neither can remember exactly when they first met. Gavin worked on the Fitzwilliam Hotel in Dublin, which was a Conran project, and both displayed gardens at Chelsea Flower Show. But it wasn't until Conran saw Gavin on television alongside the interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen that he got in touch. "He absolutely hated what Laurence was saying, and he loved what I said," says Gavin with relish. "It was at that point he decided we should do a book together."
Beautiful to behold, Outdoors is the result of two years of monthly meetings around Conran's kitchen table. Gavin says the pair had hardly any disputes about which gardens should be included, despite having design outlooks that do not always mesh. "He would be taste. I would be brash," Gavin says. "We come to design from such different worlds. He went to public school. His father played rugby for England. I was born to suburbia and went to Templeogue College. I was rebelling against that - rebelling against my parents' garden, if you like."
Ironically, they diverged on their feelings towards Conran's work from the 1950s; Gavin admits to feeling crushed when Conran dismissed one of his gardens as being too retro. "He was very much 'been there, done that, why are you still harking back to that?' But, for me, that retro thing was immensely important. Dublin in the 1970s and 1980s was a dour, unloved, unlived-in kind of place, just coming out of a period of space vandalism. To look back and to see people like Conran coming together after the war and saying 'let's change things' was massively influential. Now it's come full circle, and I see all the changes taking place in Dublin. People really care about design."
To some, Gavin will always be the man who filled his 2004 display at Chelsea Flower Show with giant multicoloured lollipops and a silver space pod - now in residence at Bellinter House, the boutique hotel in Co Meath. More recently, the plans that he and his company, Diarmuid Gavin Designs, have created have been rather restrained. "For a period of several years I was encouraged to do whatever I wanted, to really push the boundaries. Television allows you to do that. But it got to the stage where it was just brash for the sake of it. I began to think, why am I still doing that?"
So Gavin found himself returning to the kind of classic garden designers he had always reacted against. "When you're young there's a huge frustration in not being allowed to do anything [ the horticulturist and garden designer] Gertrude Jekyll didn't do 100 years ago. Everybody wanted pretty gardens. During the Renaissance period you could show joy or fear in a garden, you could shock people or put a fairground in a garden. That's because there was the money around to do it.
"In Dublin at that time there was no money for experiments, and it was frustrating, because garden design is one of the most genuinely creative things you can do. But after I got a chance to break all the rules I realised I was just moving on for moving on's sake. That's when I returned to those classic garden designers. I realised they were great innovators, or great perfecters of an incredible heritage." Now, though, Gavin says the restraint is coming to an end. "I think I'm coming out of it," he says with a laugh. "There is a joy in using colour, there really is. We've got a few things in the pipeline which aren't exactly restrained."
Gavin says that, far from reacting in horror to his more outre designs, his private clients, whether looking for suburban, hotel or estate gardens, are keenly receptive. "In the past 10 or 15 years people have become a lot more educated about garden design - and a lot more demanding. They've seen a lot, and they know what they want," he says with approval. "Gardens are about people. You have to put them at the centre of anything you design. You're always the servant. It's important to remember that."
Although difficult to price without any specifics, your average medium to large domestic garden designed by Gavin will cost €90,000, including construction. Some Dublin clients have spent up to €500,000. His wife Justine is very efficient at handling initial inquiries. He never discusses money himself.
As for the next 10 or 15 years, Gavin is certain that two elements are going to have a huge influence on garden design: the rise of suburbia and environmental concerns. "Traditionally, you couldn't say the word 'suburbia' to aloof garden designers. They didn't want to know. But if you look at the way people are living now, increasingly, gardens are suburban. Designers need to acknowledge that there are clients out there who might have a substantial budget and good judgment, too. The important thing is not to throw everything at it but the kitchen sink. You've got to retain that sense of individualism."
As far as ecology is concerned, Gavin has found that although mainstream television gardeners such as Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don have been working organically for more than a decade, most of their fans are still happily ploughing chemicals into their gardens.
"People are not receptive to it yet, but they will be. With farming going the way it's going, gardens are the last refuge for wildlife. Then there are all the other questions we need to ask. If you import stone from China for your garden, what chemicals are being used when it's quarried? What is it costing, in ecology terms, to transport it?"
With offices in London and Dublin, and clients as far away as South Africa, Portugal and Italy, Gavin is busier than he has ever been. In Ireland alone there's the conversion of the Ormeau Bakery grounds in Belfast, a community park and playground in Carndonagh, Co Donegal, and the landscaping of Langton House Hotel, in Kilkenny. His name crops up at the exclusive Doonbeg Hotel in Co Clare, at Lough Rynn Castle in Mohill, Co Leitrim, and Kilronan Castle on Lough Meelagh in Co Roscommon. The latest consumer magazine to hit the news stands in Ireland and the UK is Diarmuid Gavin's Garden Designs. He and Conran have just embarked on another book - on planting - and more television is in the pipeline. Down in Co Wicklow, where he and his wife have recently bought a house, Gavin is working on his own garden, using the Portuguese tiles and planting designs he used for a recent display at Chelsea.
So when the garden historians of the future cast their judgments, what will be their description of a typical Diarmuid Gavin garden from circa 2007? "A bit mad. A bit quirky. That'd be their decision if they look at the television for 25 minutes. If they look at my work a bit closer, I think they'll describe it as architectural."
Outdoors by Diarmuid Gavin and Terence Conran is published by Conran Octopus, £40 in UK