Landscape architect says urban plans do not reflect local culture

Irish towns and cities are becoming "homogenised" by landscape plans that bear no relation to culture or environment, an award-winning landscape architect, Ms Mary Reynolds, has said.

One such example is Galway City Council's plan for redesigning Eyre Square, which is reminiscent of an "American plaza" and will involve removal of some 70 trees, simply because they will interfere with the landscape architecture "concept", Ms Reynolds said.

Ms Reynolds, who won a gold medal at last year's Chelsea Flower Show and has designed for Kew Gardens in London and the State's Farmleigh House in Dublin, has drawn up an alternative concept for the Galway city centre square that would involve retaining all of the existing healthy trees.

Ms Reynolds's design was unveiled by the Galway Environmental Alliance in Eyre Square's Great Southern Hotel yesterday, and involves enclosing the park in a "Celtic key pattern" paving detail. The statue of Padraic Ó Conaire would be moved to a more central position on a stone-seat wall overlooking the main park, surrounded by grass and native shrubs. The area inside the wall would be paved with granite slabs which would encircle native flowering plants.

Ms Reynolds's plan relocates Eamon O'Doherty's sculpture of the Galway hooker sails to the eastern side of the square, with the surrounding lawn mounded into flowing waves, and the Crimean cannons and Brown doorway would be removed to the Galway Civic Museum near the Spanish Arch.

The plan is to be presented to Galway City Council.