A war of words surrounded an award-winning Irish designer's garden at the Hampton Court Palace show, writes Jane Powers
MY HEAD IS BUZZING for hours after I meet Fiann Ó Nualláin, but in a not unpleasant way. His conversation has given me enough food for thought to fill up my mental larder for hours. And his good humour has imparted a lovely flavour to the rest of the day.
He's not long back from the Royal Horticultural Society's Hampton Court Palace show, where his visually restrained, but significance-heavy garden, "Cuimhne", has taken a silver medal in the "conceptual" category. It hasn't been an easy run with the RHS, with his garden's classification being pushed from pillar to post (well, from "conceptual" to "show" category, and back into "conceptual"), and with a fairly serious misunderstanding about some words on a stone sphere. But he's not complaining, and is instead thrumming with refreshingly cheerful energy.
His garden is - quite simply (visually, that is) - a great stone ball "dropped" into a green pool of grass, with concentric raised rings radiating out from it. He constructed it earlier this summer at Bloom in the Phoenix Park (where he also got a silver medal), and again at Garden Show Ireland in Hillsborough Castle. But it was always destined for Hampton Court: "The Hampton Court show is renowned for its water features, and I wanted to do a water-feature garden that had no water," he says, with just a hint of mischievousness.
"That was the starting point, but it evolved into something else." It developed into a many-layered creation, with different ideas pulsating underneath its corrugated green surface. The central one, he explains, "is based on how memory is actualised, on the fact that consciousness is the still pool, and that every experience is the pebble thrown in, and the ripples coming from it. The greater that experience, the more is imprinted."
The name, Cuimhne, means memory, as well as memorial. The latter notion is also embodied in the great stone sphere, and in the grass - two of the most prevalent materials for memorials throughout the world. Monumental stones - such as standing stones, Ogham stones, ceremonial stones and stone crosses - are also part of our ancient Irish culture, and, along with prehistoric earthworks, an important element in our landscape and heritage. Ó Nualláin's stone is inscribed with the words "No more genocide", a message that he feels needs to be impressed upon our consciousness, in order to stop man's inhumanity to man - whether it be through bigotry, racism, social exclusion or fear.
It was the inscription that caused a bit of "a flap" with the RHS, when the designer was about to construct his garden at Hampton Court. "They said those words weren't authorised." But, in fact, they had been clearly spelled out in his submission. Nonetheless, he agreed to present a blank sphere, and to "leave it up to the individual participant in the garden to reflect their own memory".
Yet, after he had changed the catalogue entry and the sign, and printed fresh leaflets to accommodate the idea of the now wordless sphere, the RHS did an about-turn, and approved the "No more genocide" epigraph. It was too late to have the stone engraved, as it had been at Bloom and at the show in Hillsborough Castle. Instead, he had to make do with graphite and eyeliner (the latter to add depth and waterproofing). Resourceful, undoubtedly - but because the brief had said "hand-carved", and the lettering was obviously not, the garden lost valuable marks when it was judged.
Ó Nualláin was more than compensated by the public's response to his work. There were the innumerable Irish ex-pats who were moved by another layer of meaning, that of the "féar gortach" or the "hungry grass". This folk belief holds that certain patches of land retain the imprint of the deep suffering felt in the Famine, and that those who walk on the ground now feel a similar pain and hunger as they pass over it.
"But, it's not like me going over to England and going: 'Bold people, remember the famine!' " he clarifies. "It's more that this thing has resonances with every culture. People would read the sign, and then they would talk to me about their experiences."
Among those who stopped for a word were some who had been touched by the London bombings of July 7th, 2005, and a man who had survived the dockland blitz in the second World War. One English couple told him that the work should be in the Tate Modern. "That was lovely, that was beautiful, that made up for everything," he says of their comment.
The version of "Cuimhne" that Ó Nuailláin constructed earlier in the summer at Garden Show Ireland is now installed permanently at Hillsborough Castle - which gives him great pleasure. In the future, he would like to work more with public spaces: "I want to do work that improves the environment, by the planting that I would use - because I am very interested in plants that filter the toxins out of the air - but also by aesthetically lifting the mood, and symbolically having an impact on people's lives. That's where I want to go."
This public-spiritedness is where he's come from too, because for several years he worked in horticulture with unemployed people, and with early school-leavers in a disadvantaged area of Dublin. On the latter project, although many of the participants were dead set against the idea of gardening ("that's gay"), within weeks they were planting trees, and growing carrots and cabbages for their ponies.
Ó Nualláin's own childhood, in Rialto, was fortunate: "We grew up between the two canals, surrounded by natural history: there were bees, butterflies, dragonflies and all kinds of things." He laments the present wasteland status of some of Dublin's public spaces, and is itching to get his hands on some place he can transform. Funding, of course, is not easy when one's most recent creation is so minimal and confounding that it prompted remarks at Bloom such as, "Are you not looking for work?". However, his garden at Bloom the previous year, entitled "Resistance", had appealing, airy planting, and a sanctuary-like enclosure. This designer can definitely do "pretty", as well as "thought-provoking". That garden, incidentally, was to be built by a crew of volunteers and their relatives from one of the horticultural therapy projects, but because some of the participants were under 18, "health and safety" put the kibosh on that. In the end, Ó Nualláin and his girlfriend, Lisa Kelly, built the garden on their own.
Since then, she has been involved in all his creations. For next year, they have Bloom to consider, and perhaps another garden for Hampton Court, for which Ó Nualláin has again been asked to submit a design.
In the meantime, says the designer, "I'd like if there was a space of derelict ground where people were throwing their cigarette butts, and I'd like to turn that into a place of beauty, where people could go, and where some woman who is coming home with her shopping can sit down and take a rest."
Fiann Ó Nualláin can be contacted at 087-3154539; www.inspiringgardens.ie
