It hasn't always been rosy in Diarmuid Gavin's garden. He was a shy child, then a bad businessman, and at one point was almost destitute. Now, with a design practice in London, and TV appearances everywhere - even on RTÉ - the seldom-still garden designer finds life is finally 'great', he tells Roísín Ingle.
If you've ever harboured impure thoughts while watching Diarmuid Gavin in his recycling ads - it's all those eco-friendly double entendres and lingering shots of Gavin's backside - you'd enjoy watching the gardening world's enfant terrible go about his day job. He is working in Rathfarnham, Dublin 16, putting the finishing touches to his design for a garden that features on an upcoming RTÉ show. He wears jeans and smart slip-on shoes, and when he's concentrating he runs a hand through that tousled mop of hair. You can't help noticing that his blue eyes have a George Clooney-ish crinkle at the edges when he laughs. And although he has known darker times, Diarmuid Gavin laughs an awful lot these days.
It's a sunny afternoon, but you get the impression that even if it were lashing rain he'd still be wearing that striped blue and white shirt with at least four of the buttons undone, revealing the kind of chest hair sported by heroes in Mills & Boon novels. Of the four women surveying him from a safe distance farther up the garden, two of them freely admit they have a mild crush on the happily married designer. The other two admit to admiring his "passion" and his "talent" and go as far as saying he has "charisma". His appeal is about much more than his famous and sometimes controversial gardens.
The woman of the house, a solicitor called Anne Marie Dermondy, has developed an interesting relationship with Gavin in the past eight weeks, while he has been monitoring the progress of his design for the show, I Want A Garden. They've been verbally sparring all day. "Feck off," he retaliates when Dermondy jokes that whenever there have been problems with the garden, he "runs for cover".
Standing on one of two extraordinary-looking wooden structures designed by Gavin, she confesses to never praising him directly. "I think he's incredible, but I'd never tell him," she says, smiling. The two open pavilions are raised above the ground on telegraph pole stilts which jut into the blue sky, while the roofs of both structures curve like skate-park ramps.
"We had various problems along the way because of building these structures, but, financially, we were too far in to reverse. Thank goodness over the past three days it's taken off and we are really happy, even if the budget has kept rising." When they started, the budget was €40,000, but at last count it had risen to €75,000. The creation of the Rathfarnham garden has proved so eventful it will form two episodes of the eight-part series which is due to start later this month.
Dermondy's family, in common with all the participants in the programmes, have been responsible for sub-contracting the construction work themselves. However, the prospect of having their garden designed by Gavin was a major draw. In this case, Gavin's bold ideas opened up the lower part of the garden, alongside the Dodder, which had been blocked off for safety reasons. Now, the riverside area below the pavilions is being reclaimed and planted with massive "triffid-like plants," Gavin says, creating a baby jungle for the three children - two of whom are named Diarmuid and Gavin - to explore.
"I saw this garden and I knew exactly what it should be," he says. "I saw adventure. I saw Huckleberry Finn and Mark Twain. I suppose it was a bit scary because when they opened the pages of my design they didn't say anything for a few minutes. I wanted this garden to feel like it was flying up to the treetops. I wanted something with a sense of adventure, but which was also a grown-up design. I told them it would be more expensive than they intended, but this was the only way I see this garden happening."
Today it's where he's workig, but once upon a time this woodland area was Diarmuid Gavin's playground. He remembers walking down the river in his wellies as a child, messing around in Bushy Park, near where he grew up. "It's great to be doing this kind of work in Ireland," says the veteran of several Chelsea Flower Shows and countless gardening series on British television.
With the garden now heaving with workers and TV crew, Gavin's agent drops us down to The Orchard, a pub nearby, where his sisters used to work as lounge girls. It's not long before the conversation moves from lofty designs to more prickly terrain: his clashes with the gardening establishment in both Britain and Ireland. A spat with Bunny Guinness over the size of his boundary wall at Chelsea two years ago, and a row about sponsorship, provided great fodder for his BBC programme Diarmuid's Big Adventure, which charted his path to Chelsea. The lottery-funded garden, with its colourful lollipops, womb-like pods and huge Fabergé egg, divided critics but won him a silver medal, even if Gavin might have thought it deserved gold.
According to Gavin, the gardening world is even more bitchy than, say, the fashion industry. Just exchange the stilettos for secateurs at dawn. "I had a friend who used to produce The Clothes Show, and then she moved over to my show, and she couldn't get over the bitchiness in gardening circles. You meet it everywhere in gardening," he says.
There are two Irish gardening writers that he refuses to be interviewed by, because of bad press in the past. Why does he think they have it in for him? "One of them knew me before the fame happened, so I think it's a case of the green-eyed monster. The other one is nice one minute but has always got the daggers out. I am not into messing or playing games. I don't like snide people. I like being told to my face if someone doesn't like what I do. It annoyed me in the beginning, but I got over it by imagining one of these critics as a character from Little Britain. It doesn't bother me any more, but I don't do interviews with them; I just don't want to go there."
Gavin says he never felt he fitted in when he was growing up, so maybe sticking out like a wild sunflower among a prim bed of roses suits him better than he lets on. "I grew up as a bit of a loner, awkward and shy, without many friends," he says.
A family tragedy that occurred when he was a young boy added to the sense of isolation, he agrees, although because he is conscious his parents will read this interview, he is reluctant to talk about his brother, who was knocked down and killed as they walked to school together, not far from the garden he is working on. "It made me quite inward and guarded and everything like that," he says, his voice less sure than before.
I ask about his love of gardens as a young boy. "I was a daydreamer. I was always fascinated by objects and places, and just my environment. I'd dream my way through life in a very lazy way," he says. As a cub scout, he encountered gardens in the area while bob-a-jobbing. "I found it all fascinating, but in a time warp, all these rose beds and borders. My parents' idea of gardening was everything had to be neat and tidy, and you wouldn't want anyone to say anything bad, just have them look at the lovely flowers. I loved nature and I loved being outdoors. When I left school I knew I wanted to be a chef or a gardener."
On leaving Templeogue College - the school's newsletter still tracks their famous past pupil's progress - he trained as a commis chef for a few months, but then he left to join Mackey's, "this old plant shop" on Mary Street in Dublin city centre. He then spent three years training in horticulture at the National Botanic Gardens. "I came out and expected to be this great entrepreneur with this great business," he says. "I started with nothing and it went slowly downhill over seven years."
He describes these as "the lost years", during which times got so tough that at one point he was virtually homeless and had to relyon friends for a place to stay. "I was terrible at business, so I always owed money here and there. I had dreams, but they weren't going anywhere. And I was getting older and older and older. Ireland was a different place then," he says.
He grew increasingly disillusioned designing gardens that won him medals at the RDS Spring Show but didn't satisfy his creativity. "I could do those gardens with my eyes shut. I could turn up at the RDS and win a medal; that was easy. But it doesn't challenge you intellectually or creatively, and I spent a lot of those years thinking it out in my head. I would go to meetings with gardeners and designers, and it was a fascinating moment for me when I was standing in someone's garden and I realised actually, they are not wrong, but you are not wrong either. It was like I gave myself permission to explore other possibilities. It made me fight more," he says.
At this point we head back to the house, where his expert eye is needed in the garden. Later, over coffee in Anne-Marie's sitting room, he takes off his shoes and curls his feet underneath him on the armchair. He talks about meeting Justine, now his wife, the daughter of former social diarist Terry Keane and Justice Ronan Keane. He was working on the family garden when they met, and says he made it clear to her from the beginning that his life was a "disaster". "I was doing gardens I didn't want to do and losing my creativity made me do it badly. A lot of people gave me chances by looking after me and supporting me, and I let them down continually."
I suggest that perhaps he was able to charm people into supporting him. "I think people may have thought I got them to do things in a calculating way. In the past people may have thought that . . . It was all innocent on my part, but people did believe in me and then it would be a failure and then they were let down," he says.
He cites Justine's belief in him as crucial to his current success. The couple have an 18-month-old daughter, Eppy. "She said something one night just to the effect that 'you can do it' and we didn't know what that meant at the time, but I remember thinking if someone as amazing as her believed in me, then maybe I could do it . . . It built me up like nothing else, at what was my lowest point," he says.
He formulated a two-year plan, which was to bluff his way into Chelsea with an Irish-themed garden, impressing organisers so much they would let him back to do the contemporary garden he really wanted to do. He returned home with a bronze medal in 1995, not quite as prestigious an accolade as Gavin might have let on during his subsequent appearance on The Late Late Show, but people were starting to take notice of him, and it felt good.
"At that point I just had the feeling there must be more to life, and after the second Chelsea, people started believing in me and asking me to do things, and I embraced everything that happened. I think there were 30 offers of TV in that first year," he says. His charm, easy manner and photogenic looks meant the work started pouring in. His big break was the show Home Front in the Garden, which made him a household name in Britain.
There were casualties of this sudden fame. His appearance on The Late Late Show meant he was dropped, he says, by some of his old college mates. "I wasn't getting invited for drinks like everybody else, and eventually a friend told me, 'the lads think you have gone above your station'. The kids these days are confident and everyone accepts it, but back then you weren't allowed to be," he says. He fidgets as he talks about this, at one point moving across the room to sit at the farthest point possible away from me in a red leather armchair. When I express surprise, he moves back. "Sorry," he says, "that's just me."
He doesn't like looking back, he says. Looking back reminds him of the people he let down when life was "desperate" and his creativity was thwarted. "It's horrible looking back, because it wasn't good. I was letting people down and letting myself down, and there are things I know even today that I still have to do, things I have to sort out which I haven't done yet. We talked earlier about people thinking I was calculating . . . I have one or two friends who were particularly quite angry, so that really upset me. When you become famous, people question your motives and their perception of you changes. Even your family tell you they are watching you to see if you change, and it drives you mental, because it's not about that."
I ask him if he feels guilty about some of the things he hasn't put right. "Obviously not guilty enough, if I haven't put them right . . . " he says, leaving the statement hanging in the air.
We are interrupted briefly by Anne Marie Dermondy, who comes in to show Gavin a spider that, although now dead, spun an impressive web in one of her wine glasses six years ago. "I kept it; I thought you might be interested," she tells Gavin before, as they both laugh, he shoos her away like a fly. "People say I am difficult to work with," he says. "They all say the same thing: 'He is a nightmare, but he's brilliant.' " He seems perfectly fine with this assessment and mentions that he runs a design studio in London, where he has a home, and he employs eight people there. "It's the happiest office in London," he says, adding that he wants to open a studio in Dublin, where he also has a base.
"I warn people when I am going to be difficult. I turn the phone off. I don't talk to anyone." It's hard to reconcile the energetic 42-year-old sitting in this smart suburban home in Rathfarnham with the "awkward, shy, loner" he says he was as a boy.
I ask what's next for him, and he talks animatedly about a reality TV show for Sport Relief named Only Fools on Horses, which began on BBC last night, and about how the other day Pamela Anderson recorded a message on his video camera, saying "Diarmuid rides like a girl," and how Carrie Fisher of Star Wars has asked him to design her garden. "She wrote down her address in Beverly Hills!" he exclaims, not quite believing it. "She's a friend of Ruby Wax, who is also in the show-jumping programme, but she's supporting me."
He's full of chat about a project he is working on, a major art and gardening installation, which will temporarily transform Temple Bar. He is delighted that the club owners John Reynolds and Jay Bourke have just bought one of his more controversial Chelsea gardens to put in Bellinter, their country house hotel near Navan, opening in August. "It's in storage in the same warehouse where Damien Hirst has his art," Gavin says.
He enthuses about a book and exhibition he is working on with Sir Terence Conran - "we get on very well," he says. "And I presented Top of the Pops," he adds. "Things are very, very good." They certainly sound it. "Things are great."
Then he's off down to the bottom of the garden, where he is no doubt "a nightmare but brilliant" for the rest of the day. A man on a mission making up for the lost years.
I Want A Garden begins on Thursday, July 20th at 8.30pm on RTÉ 1. Only Fools on Horses is on BBC1 nightly this week and concludes next Saturday. See TV listings for details. Jane Powers is on holiday. Her Gardens column does not appear in this issue, and will return on July 22nd