contractor – Peter Donegan Garden Design & Landscaping

Why is there a picture of a man sitting on a truck at the bottom of this post…? The man is my good friend Thomas. You may know him from his most unusual garden guest post here. But you may also know Thomas from the much famed Irish Allotments – something, unknowns to most, he does in his spare time. All told that makes him a pretty good guy. And he is. Genuinely.

Anyhow Thomas and Máire [another story, but, via genuinely the sincerest gesture of genorosity I’ve ever heard – yes niceness still exists 🙂 ] have just moved out of their apartment and into their first house home. Naturally, like all young couples – the extra dollars didn’t exist for their first garden to look like Southfork immediately… and Thomas being an eco-geek like myself wanted it to have a story anyway charachter.

Tommy, would you like a recycled garden… ?

To answer the original question… We had taken apart a garden recently and rather than dump the stone to landfill, I called Thomas. Client also agreed and felt it was very much the ‘thing to do’. A truck was hired for one hundred euro.

What had actually accumulated was

45 metres squared paving
2 tonne of decorative gravel
20 metres squared steppings
25 metres squared cobbles
and some chicken wire
…and a half sheet of trellice

I thought of some of my friends, years ago, when the starter home and mortgage deposits were being paid back to the sibblings they were borrowed from [funny thing, a story like that would probably make the news today 🙂 ]. A shed, a fence, a something to enhance the eyesore was required and we all chipped in. All of the friends. There were *no* complaints, it was the done thing. Feng Shui’s weren’t on the wish list. Thomas was starting were I started 🙂

As a by the way he lives in Cork and although I will be there whenever he needs help… I will not be responsible for the final outcome of the ‘design’. Note no.2 is that apart from the truck hire of €100 all materials were taken/ given free gratis. More important. There was a massive feel good factor for all parties concerned. Everyone felt good about this story. Thomas has also agreed to write a little story with pictures of the complete garden and its progress on his weblog:)

So from now, if I do a garden and the client decides/ agrees with the decision to do so – I will take the ‘whatever it is’ to my home rather than to landfill [where possible] and write a post on my blog to see if we can find a good home for it.

What do you think?

irish horticulture worth almost €1 billion

Thanks to Bord Bia we do have statistics on the irish hortiultural and so much more. But I never thought that a magazine outside of The Emerald Isle would cover the value of our hortiultural market. This article titled Irish landscape market hits high was published in Horticulture Week in August 2nd 2007. If you told me this ten years ago, would I have believed you?

The value of the Irish commercial landscaping market is at a record high, Horticulture Ireland has revealed.
The organisation, set up by the Irish government to promote the industry, announced at last week’s Kildare Growers Trade Show in Naas, Co. Kildare, that the market is worth almost €1bn (£673.8m).
Development marketing executive Gary Graham said: “Early estimates suggest the value of the Irish commercial landscaping market is at least €860m [£579.4m]. It’s the highest so far and everyone’s trying to get a piece of the action.”
He also revealed that the industry has experienced a 42 per cent growth over the past four years.
The increase is a direct result of Ireland’s booming housing and commercial property market, which has led to a rise in the number of public spaces and landscaped gardens required by developers.
Figures (from Irish market-research company Sherry FitzGerald) show that the office market in Dublin alone looks to set hit a record high this year.
The amount of accommodation taken up during the first half of the year reached 160,500sq m — almost double the level recorded for the same period in 2006.
However, Graham warned that as new offices are filled and housing requirements are met, the boom could grind to a halt.
“There has been a rapid increase in property values over the past 10 or 15 years but the increase over the past two years has levelled off. People will now be closely watching, waiting to see what the implications are for the sector.”
The Irish Times reported that Irish house prices fell for the third month in a row in May. The average house price in Ireland is now €304,166 (£204,905), 2.1 per cent below the level it was at the start of this year.
But Peter Donegan of Peter Donegan Landscaping said that as that the commercial sector slows, the domestic market is on the up. “The market is two-fold. There’s the industrial side — motorways, hotels and the like — and there’s the housing market, where people are realising that if they landscape their garden their home sells better. People in Ireland have become a bit more educated in horticulture.”
Graham agreed, saying: “The domestic garden market is just getting there now.”