A Decade Measured Out in Gardens

County Meath gardener James McConnell has enhanced Herberts’, his own garden outside Navan, in the decade since his RTÉ SuperGarden and Bloom wins in 2010. John Curran discusses the gardener’s long decade of creative achievement. Read on for a virtual garden visit.

- John Curran

Creating a garden is such a long-term, time-hungry activity that if you thought about it too much at the outset, you might shy away from the commitment that a real garden takes to bring into being, and afterwards to maintain.

However, some people garden like others paint, sculpt, write or make films. It’s their way of reacting to and thinking about the world, a way of expressing ideas, but instead of paint or sound, the gardener uses whatever the soil, the climate or the site provide as his raw materials. This challenging art has attracted fine minds and brave souls in every era and since Adam’s enforced exit from the original garden, the world has been a little bit more like that lost paradise as a result of their efforts. And effort is what being a gardener is all about: he knows too well that effort, like in every other any art form, can never be subtracted from the creative process.