Garden: Tigers Childcare Garden, Swords, Co. Dublin.

This garden in mind, I’ve somehow started thinking back on my growing up in 1980’s Ireland. Not so I might start talking about chiselers and in my day we didn’t have type talk. More I started thinking of them itchy knitted Christmas jumpers, growing plants under my bed, waking up to Baba O’Reilly, rounders and my Mothers octave higher pitched tone regularly reminding me how I never had any toes left in my ‘good shoes’. Good times.

To our garden(s) and styles at the time, Ireland hadn’t really hit the log-roll pandemic and composting was solely known a heap down the back of the garden. And if you could find a lawn mower without a briggs and stratton engine in this country, you got sent to Bull Island for 10 years so people could point at you. Or so legend has it.

To more serious matters; and fast track forward to present day and I guess there is an element of how far things have come and though I (?) don’t think it was as we know it today; in part as I’m one of 8 children; Childcare seems to have evolved and in this case of outdoor spaces and sensory and childrens play gardens, so much for the better.

This gardens before and after video.

To be fair here and again as with all of the great projects I have been a part of, they require an equally really great client (I hate that word… but whilst I’m on the subject, here I had a really great one.). One who will essentially say yes I want and or, put their trust in you (me in this case) to let my sometimes funny head allow and make things happen. In short, regarding this garden, a brief was given; designs and conceptuals were drawn up; amended ever so slightly and put into action. And it was created.

From the colours, the surfaces, a sedum green roof, sand pits, sound walls, planting chosen by hand and planted, built-in cooking and water areas and water sensory areas the list is absolutely endless and every single piece of it just about hand-made. It is also a garden I should add that will require maintenance. And it is one that for me rates up there with the very best of them. And genuinely without wishing to take any of the glory, again somebody had to say we want or yes.

Genius. Love it. Happy. Very.
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