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Metal daisies from lollipop man
Valentine Low, Evening Standard16 May 2008
Diarmuid Gavin has done it again. Four years after his infamous lollipop garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, the designer has created a Chelsea garden featuring giant metal daisies.
Looking - in his own words - like a cross between The Wizard Of Oz and Honey I Shrunk The Kids, the garden has been created with designer Sir Terence Conran.
It is an outdoor café surrounded by box-hedge balls and grasses and overshadowed by a canopy of 10ft daisies.
This year's flower show starts on Tuesday and runs until Saturday.
Gavin described his garden as a landscape of "overblown daisies waving lightly in the wind, underplanted with a glorious garden ... daisies which you could walk under and marvel at or look down on; daisies which in daytime, because of their cheerfulness, became the centre of attention but at nighttime, under-lit, became something absolutely magical."
Gavin, 44, said the design was a sequel to his lollipop garden for Camelot in
2004. "The daisies are about being lighthearted and smiling," he said. "But they are more elegant than what I've done before, more whimsical. It is a café garden. The daisies provide a degree of shade over the tables and chairs. You really need to see it in sunshine - the shadows are incredible."
Metal tendrils also stretch up the stems. Gavin said: "If you want to grow something up them then it would allow some support. If you used them as the basis of an arbour you could grow roses up them, or sweetpeas or even beans." The garden, sponsored by property developer the Oce‚nico Group, includes a wooden pavilion designed by Sir Terence with laurel bushes at the rear.
The daisies were inspired by some French daisy chairs Gavin found in a shop in Pimlico when he was setting up last year's Chelsea garden. "I saw these chairs in a shop window and began to obsess about them," he said. "I didn't even know if I could afford them."
But he could - just - and bought them, promising everyone he would sell them on eBay afterwards. "I didn't do that," he confessed. "They are at my house in Wicklow now." Gavin, who had a highly public row at the 2004 show with neighbouring gardener Bunny Guinness, clearly still has mixed feelings about appearing at Chelsea. "It is not an easy place to be," he said. "Everybody is trying to impress. It is full of egos - people here are in competition. It can be a fairly vicious place."
Then he thinks of his daisies and smiles: "All I want is to sit with Terence, him smoking a cigar, me enjoying a glass of something, in the middle of this green oasis and watch people smile."
Tickets are still available for Thursday and Friday evening only.
