Technology garden could be Bloom's paradise found

A Twitterfall, robot garden appliances, with hackers creeping in the undergrowth. What’s not to like?

I HAVE attended the Phoenix Park garden festival Bloom for each of its past five years, and seen the show gardens grow (pun intended) in style and ambitiousness and the garden themes become ever more creative and unusual.

Strolling about this year over two days (one visit was not enough), I found myself planning a technology garden for next year. Stop sniggering. I am confident that the idea isn’t completely incongruous – after all, this year a garden entered by the Straffan Steam Museum, co-designed by Sophie Graefin Von Maltzen and the museum (which has its own on-site gardens to visit), took a silver gilt medal in the Engaging Spaces category. So there.

The garden was dominated attractively by a huge piece of aged, rusting steam engine something-or-other. Meanwhile, the Victorian walled garden this year featured bits and pieces of old tools and machinery, from some impressive saw blades to old lawnmowers.

These all showed that technology and machinery can have their aesthetic role in a garden setting. So no laughing at my idea for a technology garden.

I can see it beginning to take shape. First, I would plan a leafy, tree-filled Twitter corner where the garden visitor could tweet alongside the visiting birds. Or perhaps the birds would need to be caged – to represent metaphorically the way Twitterers can become confined within their addiction to record their every living moment in 140 characters or less.

Nearby would be an ergonomically designed armchair as well as that ubiquitous tech conference furnishing, the beanbag, positioned nicely under the trees’ shade. These would accommodate the iPad and laptop users, so as not to wash out the screen with too much confounded light. Cool dimness will suit such users best.

Only paces away would be a lovely little corner with a tea kettle and coffee machine complete with all needed supplies to keep garden visitors properly caffeinated: coffee, tea, chai. No wimpy useless little 6oz coffee cups, either.

For the hardcore technologist, the garden will stock only extra-large coffee or commuter mugs holding enough liquid to deliver at least twice the daily recommended intake of caffeine.

As a consequence, back behind the trees and carefully hidden from view – because it would be a needed, but not aesthetically engaging, part of the garden – would be a little toilet facility.

Back out in the garden, near the shady zone, would be a gorgeous water feature with a sandpit in a sunny open area, large enough for the visitor to spread out a towel and bask in the sun, reading their Kindle (which of course can be read in full sunlight, according to the bumf).

Behind the water feature would be a Twitterfall wall that would cunningly appear to be raining random tweets about Bloom into the cool waters below.

I’d need to add in a grassy lawn area too, on which Husqvarna’s robot lawnmower would roam back and forth, keeping everything nice and neat.

The robot lawnmower would serve a secondary purpose of providing something hypnotic to watch for the Twitter and laptop users in need of exercising their eyeballs away from a screen for a few moments every hour or so.

When the mower is not in use, the grassy zone would be used by Kinect game console users who will need the room to fling themselves about and leap in the air as they play various games using the device.

Needless to say, the area would also have a wifi zone, but with a pathetically obvious password – perhaps, “bloom” – to reflect our real-world propensity to expose our networks.

Along one back wall would be a clear Perspex soundproof room for mobile and smartphone users. There, they could shout into their devices to their hearts’ content and walk, talk and gesticulate like mad things, without annoying the heck out of everyone nearby – plus their antics would provide a lively, and ever-moving, but safely enclosed, display.

Over in one corner, accidentally dropped amongst the foxgloves and poppies by an anonymous employee, would be an unencrypted government or corporate-issue laptop, full of thousands of records that might include either sensitive financial or health information, and definitely credit card numbers.

Creeping in the undergrowth would be a hacker or two, to add a bit of excitement and colour, as well as a trendily edgy note.

Hidden amongst the garden plants would be many deceptively real-looking fake rocks that would actually contain all the endless power outlets needed to keep all the devices charged.

Plus, the garden would have a fully retractable clear roof, to be put into play anytime rain threatened the electronics.

And finally, the garden would, of course, be full of bugs.

I am sure a few of our Irish-based technology companies will be in contact soon to fund this creation for the 2012 Bloom.