To describe your ideal garden as a “jungle” would once have been regarded as anathema but it’s exactly what Diarmuid Gavin is looking for.
Along with Carol Klein and assorted guests, the Dublin-born garden designer is assuming the role of judge-cum-assessor in the new BBCNI six-part series Greatest Gardens, which starts on Monday.
From a shortlist of 15, which includes a tropical backyard in Lisburn, a woodland plot near Ballymoney and transformed Co Tyrone farmland, the Greatest Garden title will be bestowed on the basis of creativity, planting skills and environmental awareness.
Securing his ‘celebrity gardener’ status in the early noughties, the 61-year-old Gavin gained a reputation among the British gardening fraternity as an irreverent Roy Keane-type character, and while he’s perhaps mellowed since famously falling out with Bunny Guinness at Chelsea, he still retains a typically Irish disdain for pretension and snobbery.
“I think it’s important to puncture pomposity wherever you find it,” he says.
“Gardening has historically been part of a social order, part of a way to keep people in their place, part of the way to show off your wealth, and that really doesn’t do it for me. It was about controlling nature, but also about controlling people, looking down on them. I don’t like any of that, so I puncture it – though maybe not as eagerly as I did 30 years ago.”
Plants and passion are what Gavin looks for in a good garden and he’s even prepared to forgive gnomes and bedding if they enhance the personality of a space.
“I definitely like a jungle with plenty of lushness and foliage, but different people want different things from their gardens” says Gavin.
“For those in smaller houses, the garden or yard is like an outdoor room and they want it to flow out from the interior, while at the other end of the scale it’s about growing fruit and vegetables. For me, it’s an escape. somewhere to get lost in.”
The one thing he won’t tolerate is the use of chemicals and what he terms “bad gardening practice”.
“When I studied in the Botanic Gardens in Dublin I couldn’t believe the amount of time given over to mixing chemicals – chemicals to kill things or chemicals to enhance growth,” he recalls.
“I’ve always been against that. I’ve also been against Uber gardening, which by that I probably mean RHS type gardening, where it’s all for yield and colour and the amount you can grow. We turn off too many people in both of those ways.”
Still using concrete in his projects, Gavin advocates a style that marries contemporary design with nature, revealing that his bath isn’t in the house but “on a veranda in the garden” – hopefully hidden from the neighbours’ view.
“It’s so I can enjoy the sounds of nature and the rain as it comes down, and whatever while I’m thinking about,” he says.
“Nothing beats nature and encouraging nature to come into the garden, so it isn’t a sterile place.”
:: Greatest Gardens with Diarmuid Gavin And Carol Klein starts on Monday March 23 at 8.30pm on BBC One Northern Ireland and BBC iPlayer. The first five episodes are available to watch on BBC iPlayer after episode one airs with the grand final will broadcast Monday April 27.
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