I was in Easons, the book shop in The Pavillions Shopping Centre in Swords over the weekend. Beeline for the gardening section, as you do and browsing the shelves I spotted a new to me addition, the Bloom Inspiring Gardens Book.
Slap bang somewhere in there is the above image, a garden I won award for the design and build of waaaaaaay back in 2007. Always nice to see ones name in lights, it is the first time I have seen the book. And though I do not own a copy, I think it looks quite good over the 2 pages.
The photographs including the [original of the] above were taken by Maura Hickey.
No Rubber Soul. Silver Medal Winner. My Garden for Bloom 2007.
I love this garden. I really do. I had no sponsor. I was advised not to do it. Nobody knew what Bloom was really and although I had won awards for garden design and landscaping, this was my first *show* garden. I don’t even think I knew what a weblog was when I did this garden so there really doesn’t exist that many photographs of ‘No rubber- soul’ the garden. For some reason or another it became know as the Car-Den. Enjoy!
Peter Donegans garden design ‘No Rubber- Soul’ won silver in the large garden category in the inaugural year of Bloom in the Phoenix Park Friday 1st June 2007. During the 20 day deadline over 1,500 plants; 50 square metres of rolled lawn; 4 tonne of recycled compost; 5 tonnes of recycled bark chippings; 6 tonnes of recycled tree stumps one 1965 morris minor and an outdoor flat screen television.
Despite the rainfall over the bank holiday weekend over 50,000 people still flocked to see the unsponsored garden. No decking, no paving, no additives or preservatives…. Imagine sitting within two thirds of a 1965 Morris Minor, watching the television, smokes plumes through the front grill of your car and you sit back and watch nature and plant life grow around you. This is the garden that has no rubber but lots of soul. Built from 100% recycled and/ or recyclable products. Take a trip back to 1965 when men used shovels and gardens had soul.
Built to commemorate the many Irish men with initially, great intentions who promise to restore and rebuild projects but sometimes are never fully completed; it has been slightly adapted to via audio visual equipment to become an entertainment area of sorts and it should give the appearance that whilst unwillingly forgotten, the life of the garden continued to flourish around it.
The casino royal boat has an amazing story. Why didn’t I use it, to my [possible] advantage? The boat was a ruin. Inside-less, sideless & due to be dumped. Could I/it ever have been fully restored – no.
It was next to consider could I give it *any* use other than a skip? yes.
The question now was how does one restore the boat – to a use. The timber replacing the gaping holes would never look right. Pink was the obvious choice. It was perfect. I wanted recycling to come out of the doldrums and to be seen by young an old as something not of a rhetoric ‘wellies and cabbage patches’ of The Good Life style tv days of old. We did that. Not accepted by the Judges of Bloom or the horticultural critics… but that wasn’t the intention [ie. medals].
The pink boat became a part of my garden design for Bloom 2008 ‘pour l’amour de jeux’. A fully recycled recylable garden. Something not for the cricket judges, but for the people – a ‘show’ garden.
The problem was we had no home for the boat after. We had no sponsor [this also upset the Judges, i’m sure]. We couldn’t afford to move it again and it would have been ‘immoral’ to smash it up and put it to landfill.
The pleas went out on 2fm courtesy of Rick O shea. It was never for the money as I think you can gather by now. Hence the name – translated as ‘for a love of the game’, the reason why I put an entire company almost to financial ruin. Some critics say attention seeking – I say it would have been cheaper to put my face on billboards all over Dublin City for a year… it would. Electric Picnic were all of the right answers. It was a boat I’d got free. They took it free. They gave 2 tickets to me and 2 to auction. I outbid the highest bidder.
The casino royal bit – I knew. All involved did. At Bloom, I met a lovely guy Bill and his wife Ann at the show. Bill was a boat builder by profession. He was contracted to rebuild ‘casino royal’ all those years ago. The name had to be erased. The guy who contracted Bill went broke and the boat stayed in storage already stripped, empty and getting worse. In the meantime the name had to be removed [legally] from the boat… and it was.
A letter from Ann after the show explained:
Of course the name has been erased from the boat because of copyright. Once the film was made, it was then only permitted the use of “Casino Royale”
11). ‘Casino Royal’ Boat – donated by Peter Donegan
The 1957 Royal Cruiser Mark II is reported to have been originally christened Casino Royale and allegedly featured in the James Bond movie of the same name in 1967.
Fast forward to 2008 Peter Donegan gives it it’s inaugural land trip to the Bloom Festival where it featured, freshly painted pink (“to make people smile”) in his fully recyclable garden that he designed & landscaped for the festival. Wanting to find a good home for it after the festival he launched a national campaign on 2FM which is when we heard of it and were happy to adopt it in exchange for some festival tickets which were auctioned for the Niall Mellon Township Trust www.irishtownship.com where they hope to build a Garden of Hope community garden.
This was in June during Bloom 2008 with my garden Pour L’amour de Jeux. On the official opening day The President, her husband Dr Martin and entourage came by and stopped at my garden for a chat.
when I started this journey some people laughed. I was happy they smiled, how or why is irrelevant I suppose. Maybe some people thought I did this garden for some alternate reasons or other [?]. I didn’t. I had no sponsor. I had no money. I just had a dream to create. I still have. I also have the greatet friends who were willing to help me and drop everything just to see this journey complete. I call them the thank you so so much list and to you all, I am eternally greatful.
I just wanted to bring recycling to its ultimate level and show it didn’t need to be all dirty, muddy and somewhat hippy-esque to be involved in. I think I did? The response from the public was overwhelming! It almost made me cry I was so happy, because of their [your] response. It was also a child-like vision and like a sort of ‘drop dead fred’ style thing in my mind. I hope it never leaves me. But I still felt that the garden wasn’t really ‘accepted’.
I can’t describe the feeling when Rick spoke to me live on the airwaves. Not so much that but the response from the public, in their thousands. Thank you all. [I’ll publish this list after; it really deserves a post to itself].
And so it was narrowed down to one call from Siobhán from The Electric Picnic. She explained to me that the pink boat, my dream, would have a home for life where people could meet, a landmark of sorts. Respect and an apt retire had been found. A final resting place… and in my head I pictured this video… I think it summises the journey of Pour l’amour de Jeux from its creation and how it felt inside my mind at its journeys end… thank you.
UPDATE: siobhán has donated 2 VIP passes to ELECTRIC PICNIC. The money I will get for them will go towards my trip with the garden of hope & the Niall Mellon Township – make me an offer….. ?
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=67bdea09-4194-436e-b9f0-cdf30c01c502)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a660f4f3-96fb-48b5-8ca4-bc9c005757e5)
