Profile: He may have led the Chelsea organisers up the garden path - and got into a border dispute along the way - but Diarmuid Gavin thrives in bright light, writes Jane Powers.
It's the 200th anniversary of that most British of institutions, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), and its flagship show has been hijacked by a cocky Irishman. At this year's Chelsea Flower Show the media just couldn't get enough of garden designer Diarmuid Gavin. By the time the show closed yesterday, more column inches had been devoted to him than to any of the other participants.
So here are a few more.
All the kerfuffle about Gavin has stemmed, ostensibly, from two incidents. The first involved a dispute with Bunny Guinness, whose show garden (commemorating 175 years of the Oxford-Cambridge boat race) adjoined Gavin's "Colourful Suburban Eden" on the Main Avenue at Chelsea Flower Show. A disagreement arising from the height of the Irish designer's boundary wall grew into a nasty row, gleefully reported in all the British papers. "Fur Flies as Diarmuid Rows with Bunny", ran the headline in last Sunday's Observer.
The second incident was more serious. Weeks ago, Gavin had told the RHS Chelsea Committee that the funding for his garden was in place, but it now seems it wasn't. If one of its show gardens failed to materialise, or was sloppily cobbled together, Chelsea's reputation would be mud - so it insists sponsorship is secure.
Gavin found a backer at the last minute in the Camelot Group, the company that operates the UK National Lottery. But in its entry in the official show catalogue his office mistakenly named the National Lottery (rather than Camelot) as the sponsor - so giving the impression that public money was being frittered away on Chelsea ephemera.
But possibly worst of all was the displeasure of the RHS when it discovered that Gavin had prevaricated about having financial backing. Show director Stephen Bennett was reported in the London Times as saying that the organisers were "very cross".
They must have been very cross indeed about the manner in which the truth was revealed. Gavin admitted to the camera on Diarmuid's Big Adventure (a BBC series following the designer and his garden from drawing board to Chelsea plot) that he had falsely told Chelsea Flower Show organisers he had sponsorship lined up. But the ins and outs of exactly what happened are still hotly disputed.
The final instalment of the five-week series aired last Tuesday, the first day of the flower show. Gavin, to whom the cameras are as vital as oxygen (he has his own "Diarmuid Cam" for emergency doses), gave a virtuoso performance as lovable clown, misunderstood artist and compulsive last-minute lad.
He didn't need the "buachaill dána" T-shirt that he wore last year while presenting the BBC's Chelsea coverage to convey the message that here was a very, very bold boy.
The drama included a couple of rounds of the Bunny vs Diarmuid squabble, and the revelation that after all the tension and panic the garden was completed (more or less), and that although there was no gold for Gavin, the judges awarded him one of six silver-gilt medals.
The timing of the programme was masterful, ensuring that Gavin's garden was constantly mobbed for the remaining three days of the show. One visitor says: "It was at least four or five people deep outside, but you couldn't see Diarmuid. He was in his pod, doing an interview with Norwegian radio or something." Pods and womb-like shelters are a recurring motif in Gavin's gardens, but none has been as extravagant as the gargantuan, multicoloured, enamel-ball-studded egg that nestled at the end of his Chelsea plot. Costing at least £120,000, it was a grossly inflated, cartoony Fabergé egg - or an expensive womb for the puer aeternus from Dublin to crawl back into in the midst of all the fuss.
The determinedly forever-young designer was born on May 10th, 1964, and brought up in Fairways, a suburban estate in Rathfarnham. "I was a bit of a dreamer and felt I didn't fit in," he is quoted as saying.
He was not great at school, and failed at his first attempt to get into the College of Amenity Horticulture at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin.
A second try, three years later, was successful. The college principal, Dr Paul Cusack, then a lecturer, remembers a garden owner (for whom Gavin was doing a project) inscribing on the back of the design: "Diarmuid is an exceptional student - he will go far in his horticultural career." Just how far, that client could not have guessed. Gavin attributes much of his success to the encouragement of his wife, Justine Keane, daughter of Justice Ronan Keane and former gossip columnist Terry Keane. The couple met when Gavin was designing her mother's garden.
Gavin's first show garden was at the RDS in 1991, for which he won a gold medal. In the plot next to him was another budding designer, Hugh Ryan, now chairman of the Garden and Landscape Designers Association. "I liked him a lot, and found him fun and exciting." But what impressed Ryan most was that "the night before the show opened he had a champagne reception, and during the show he had PR people handing out Impulse perfume. I thought 'this guy means to go places!' " And go he did - to the Chelsea Flower Show in 1995. He and his then partner Vincent Barnes brought a slice of Irish countryside - complete with romantic ruin - which won a bronze medal. It was one of many awarded, but back in Ireland Gavin seemed happy to let people believe he had come third. On the Late Late Show he boasted that his team had siphoned fuel from the other competitors' equipment late at night.
He entered Chelsea again the following year, and although he won no prizes his easy manner, good looks and friendly enthusiasm were noticed by television headhunters. It was the start of a string of gardening and garden-makeover series featuring Gavin, including Surprise Gardeners (Central TV), Virgin Gardeners (Channel 5), Home Front Inside Out, Planet Patio and Home Front in the Garden (all BBC). Last night, he began a new series on BBC2, Art of the Garden, on the history of garden design.
Gavin's energy is prodigious. He has several major projects on the go at any one time, evidently thriving on this diet of stress and hard work. In the run-up to this year's Chelsea Flower Show, he was slipping away from his far-from-completed garden to present coverage for the BBC. He was blessed with loyal workers (including volunteers from Ireland), who constantly took up his slack. His charisma, it must be said, is irresistible, bathing one in a warm, we're-in-this-together glow.
Yet he has made enemies by publicly slagging off elements of the gardening world, including his fellow garden designers (Christopher Bradley-Hole, for example, whose garden won "Best in Show" at this year's Chelsea). On the other hand, privately, he is deeply generous, supporting charitable causes, while asking for no recognition.
His is the poster face of Bord Glas, the horticultural development board. Gary Graham, development marketing executive says: "He has done everything free of charge. He constantly talks about how lucky he is to be in this privileged position, and how he would like to help build a positive profile of Irish horticulture."
Opinion is divided regarding his approach to garden design.
Mary Davies, garden history editor of the Irish Garden magazine says: "His designs are wonderful fun, but they're more like features in a theme park than gardens." Yet Noelle Campbell-Sharpe of Cill Rialaig Artists' Retreat insists: "I like what he does because he pushes out the boundaries." Boundaries, suggests one prominent member of the gardening community, can perhaps be pushed too far, especially in Gavin's Chelsea garden, with its coloured spheres on sticks: "As an Eden based on lottery balls it's rather sick."
One thing is sure, though, and that is that Gavin is a remarkably talented man. In this bicentenary year of the Royal Horticultural Society, he has managed to shift the media glare away from the massive British institution and to beam it on to his laughing Irish face.