Phil
So I'm delighted to welcome onto the show today, Peter Donegan, the garden designer from Ireland. Welcome, Peter.

Kate
Hi, Peter.

Peter
Hello, Kate. Huge fans of your show. As you are well aware, I think I bigged you up before we came on air for probably about another hour of how much of a fan, I was of yours, but, what a humbling privilege to be sitting speaking to you both today.

Kate
Oh, no, not at all. We're just really, really excited to be speaking to you because you've got lots, lots to tell us, lots to talk about. So let's kick off, Peter with how did you first discover your passion for garden design?

Peter
I was about to start this. How long have you got? But I'll. I'll go with the shorter version, which is, I've got two parts to my brain, and one is complete imagination. And then something dad used to say, when we were sort of growing up, he’d always say there's two types of daydreamers. One makes it real, and the other just talks about it.
And he'd always sort of allude to I don't want to misquote them, but sort of. Which one are you? And so, if you take that as the sort of the header at the top of the page, and then I was growing plants under my bed and I put them down and eventually down into dad's garage, one of the old garages where you could drive a car into, and the windows over the top of the door.
And the plants started leaning towards the light logically - he says with a qualification in horticulture now or an education in it. And I queried why that happened, and the only answer a grown-up had at the time for me was, well, because of the light, and that wasn't good enough for my head. So down to the library in 1980s Ireland, or Britain at the time and you, you've got no internet and trying to figure out why plants lean towards light in a gardening book which doesn't have that as in the index or the glossary is a difficult thing to do.
And all of a sudden, I know what phototropism is. By definition, at six years of age, and now you can figure out how to make plants do weird things in a sense. And that's the bit where sort of science sort of begins to kick in to the point that I do my first garden aged nine, and all of a sudden you start to realise that trends age nine.
Yeah. And then I think I was doing rooftop gardens and top of multi-storey car parks when I was about 17 years of age. Went out on my own at 24 and all of a sudden you develop a reputation for being able to design gardens that are extremely difficult bills, but only ever appear like a daydream.
Or you might walk in the door and say, how do you get this to happen? And so, it becomes an element of, I don't want to say builds that nobody else wants to take on, but a builds or a garden that becomes real needs a design that can actually work. And we started obviously, my career coming up through the ranks of the industry was all of the difficult things that nobody else wanted to do.
And at 17 years of age, when you are running a crew where you're building, a croquet lawn on a tennis lawn and you've got a half a day to do it, and there's a huge time constraint, then it's sort of, calculations of how many buckets can a 130 tonne tower crane lift onto the roof of a multi-storey car park per minute, per hour, per ...
How do we get the machine up here? And if you fast track to say, 2018, a public garden that some might be aware of, then the first garden we did in France was 30ft below street level, where the only access in was 1.6m wide. And you've got three, two periods of three and a half weeks to do the first phase and then you're gone.
And if you go into the second garden and the internal courtyard of a defence castle, I should add, it's not designed to allow machinery to go in. Then we looked at originally a crane and a crane onto the roof, the crane, the materials from the street to the roof to into the central courtyard realised that wasn't working. So then we took the original design.
We deconstructed the whole thing down into pieces so that it could go to a 22 metre long Gothic archway that was 1.8m wide and 2.2m high, and then made it not look like it was ever made into pieces of Lego, if that makes better sense to you. And all of a sudden, like, the list goes on. But that's sort of the bit.
And I guess I have a mind Kate, that just it doesn't sit still. But most of the gardens we would do behind the scenes, there would be a lot of, I guess, engineering or, things to do. So when we hit the TV show, I think this is probably the best example of all of those years of experience meets education, meets surround yourself with the very best.
We took a one acre site. They built a house in ten days. We had eight days to build a garden at the same time, whilst they were building the house. And when I say it's turnkey, the postbox is built into the piers, the gates are hanging, the driveway’s done. the lights and you flip the switch. There's oranges on the table and milk in the fridge.
And, I would have found that a stroll in the park literally. Pardon the cliche.
Really? Oh my goodness. So you're a problem solver, aren't you?
I don't get stressed. I'm one of eight children, and I'm. I'm calm. I'm like genuinely calm at all times. I get frustrated if there's no Jaffa Cakes left or, you know, sort of silly stuff like that are my Marx Brothers sort of DVD collection. What a Day, you say? Didn't sort of work properly, but from a work's perspective, I absolutely adore the fact that I will go 18 hours a day.
My brain sleeps very well on very little sleep and under what I appreciate others would consider as high pressure. But to me it's like being asked to play for Arsenal. That's apart from obviously the result of recent against Manchester United. We parked up for a day for example. But it really is. You surround yourself with good people and it's a strowl.
Well, I'm extremely jealous having done garden makeover TV myself. I was a living stress ball for, you know, six months. So I wish you'd been on my team.
To take a call. I wish I had to Kate
Anyway, so. Yep. That's. Goodness me, that's not what I was expecting you to say. That's quite fascinating. I'll have to go back and listen a bit more to to what you said again. So, do you see yourself as somebody who transforms built environments with green spaces?
I think we're sort of very fortunate in the gardens that have been, that we've been asked to do. If we take the first garden that was in 2018, that was in the dried up mode of a 13th century castle. It's 30 foot below street level. The castle has fallen in the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War and the Second World War.
They know there are bodies still beneath the ground and you're one of 14 designers selected globally by default. Obviously, I've got an Irish accent, so the Bassons would have represented England. Fisher, Tomlin and Bowyer would have represented Wales. And your job or I guess the remit, put loosely is to, be respectful of the past. But for the children of today to have an eye to the future.
It's a very beautiful but yet poignantly balanced sort of, remit. But to, to woo people into a place where only bad things had ever happened. In short, where you sort of walked through and kept on walking and to, I guess by design, make them stay there. I think that's probably one where the building is existing. I know it's a 13th century thing and I get that, but when we go into the back, which is the sort of the internal courtyard, when we go into that, Henry Sirianni was the architect that they brought in to build Europe's largest war museum and attach it to the back of the castle.
And that was sort of, brutalist concrete going as far back as the eye could see. So we’d 13th century walls going around where they know that the, the, the dungeons, if I can use the word go all the way down underneath the castle, down into the ground. But at the same token, the backdrop on sort of 45% of the castle is this vast, just blank concrete, totally at extremes, with 13th century walls, if that makes sense.
And your job, then is to, evoke memory and to, bring in scent, in that context there was a great big whopping distraction. I could turn around and give you a less, seductive, sexy sort of example. But the biggest thing for us is, are there good people? Will it be a nice garden? Will it be a beautiful landscape? Can we do something to improve this.

Kate
So some people might not know, if they're not watching a kind of Irish TV? How did you get involved in in the TV show?

Peter
So I don't watch TV either. My TV is genuinely disconnected sitting in the corner. I put it back in so people would stop asking me, where is your television? And but anyway, now… I how I got into TV. Oh, God. Is, it's. I gave this as an answer before Kate, and, people said no at the end of it, they went, no, give us the serious answer. And I genuinely mean it. I think if you want to chase TV, then I understand that I never chased it. I've actually gone in and done a radio interview at a garden show in Dublin where you've got, say, 40 other designers doing public gardens, small, medium, large, etc. the state radio station asked me to do two interviews… oh sorry, on two different subjects, obviously, and I declined one, which was based on plant imports, and I just didn't want to get into the native non-native thing on a public radio family style broadcast.
If it was, if it was your podcast, it would be different because we'd have a to and fro, and we both see both sides. So we went to one on sort of how you build gardens, and they got talking to me at that, 17th century estate we designed, which was 27 acres on an 18th century estate we designed, which was 55 acres.
And it was explaining how you plant an entire avenue of trees, going 1.5km both sides in three hours. And how much this sort of costs and the numbers behind it. And so, again, it's the design brief to design to equation to it's done. And not a bead of sweat dropped. And the producer of that radio show rang the producer of a television show and said, I've just found the garden designer you need for your TV show.
They rang me and said, hi, Peter, we'd like to talk to you about television. I was standing beside one of my friends at the time. He said to me, Who's that? I said, TV show. And he went ah another one! I'll put a penny in the jar for you. And I went, let's see how it goes. So, when they came up to meet me, I didn't take it…
Not, not didn't take it seriously. I did take it seriously, but it was clean and at the back of my Jeep in a pair of shorts and a T shirt, and we had a cup of coffee sitting on the boot, the Jeep, and, And Sharon, an absolutely lovely woman to this day, huge respect for her. And Sharon said to me, that's your uniform. And I went, sorry? Ah – we’ll talk to you about it afterwards.
And so, the garden designer for two seasons had to wear, a pair of shorts and a t-shirt because that's when she first saw me, and. And that literally became a. It's a sometimes as simple as that, Kate. If I hadn't have had that phone… like we've done TV, I guess bits and bobs beforehand. So it wasn't new completely to it. But again, same thing. Phone call just came in. Hey, we're from such and such company. Would you mind?

Kate
So, your projects spanned various countries and challenges, and do you have a standout project that significantly shaped your perspective on garden design?

Peter
That's a really hard question. If I was to take show gardens, there's probably one show garden we did in Melbourne Flower Show, Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show to give its correct title Kate. And that was, ultimately based upon the suicide rates of Australian Veterans Post Service and the notes that I had written pre-any drawings being done was: if you're if you're if you have fallen, your name goes into a piece of stone. If you've fallen and your body is unfound your name goes onto a piece of Portland stone. But if you return post conflict and your mind is never the same. Then what happens? It was loosely based on the research that we had done in France and they'd done, one of these exhibitions and the exhibition was called it was a paradox.
It was called l'amour or love. And it explained how the ministry set the young soldiers with a bow or fast track to marriage, so they would have something to want to return to. And then the next bit chose the letters, the love, letters to and fro, and then the next bit chose the triumphant homecoming and all the hearts going up in the air and etc. and then the next part shows the divorce rates going exponential because the mind was not the same.
And partway through the show garden, Martin said to me, he said, you know what? What are you at Peter? He said, I don't so much get it. And I said, look, I want to bring somebody from the highest to the high to the lowest of the low. I said, I'm not a politician. I can't tell somebody not to go to war. I can't tell them a politician to apologise. But I can make a garden which, if you're young, six years of age, seven years of age, so you look at it and go, oh my God. And if you're a grown up, you can do a bit sort of deeper reading. And the media will tell the rest of the story. But the Defence Force Welfare Association are a volunteer organisation based in Australia, and they came in to give us, I guess, a vilification or a name at the bottom of the page for numbers and what happens and what really happens to veterans post-conflict and the suicide rates in Australia for veterans 107% higher if you're female to commit suicide under normal populace, 30% higher again, if you're male, the highest demographic of homeless and the list sort of goes on. And again, I'll say it Kate, I can’t tell someone that they’re wrong, but what I can do is, evoke an emotion, through a garden design, which is a difficult thing to do when you're, you've got an Irish accent, but you're in Melbourne.
And to put that in context, the note I made to Martin was, if I get this wrong, if the design is conveyed wrong, I'll never work in Australia again. Understandably, that was what was in my head anyway. But if we do it right… and Martin finished the sentence and said, and if we save one life, then it's all been worthwhile.
And it was. It's a very unusual experience Kate to watch people walk to your garden with big beaming smiles. And then the highest of the high, and then literally cop or get what's actually happening in the garden? And the tears start rolling.

Designing an emotion. Or if I can analogise it for your listeners. If you listen to Solomon Burke sing and cry to me, I think Dirty Dancing would have taken that song and anybody would know it. Just Google it. And if you close your eyes and you can sort of see that man who yearns for a woman who fell in love with, then I think you probably get the garden we designed very easily. Or as my dad would say, if you're a child or you've got a childish character, an easy to fall in love with heart, then it becomes one of them.
And I think in that context, it's probably one that I think I'm most proud of. Alright it’s the most recent, but I think it's maybe a shame that it’s only temporary if that makes sense? But it's, it's gone. It's like the, the play comes to town performs at the theatre and you're talking about something that isn't available on the internet, I guess.

Kate
Yeah. Goodness me. Thank you for sharing. That sounds amazing. What year was that, Peter?

Peter
And this is March 24

Kate
Oh, so only last year? Gosh

Peter
Yeah, yeah. Only the only last year just gone. The one prior to that, told the story of, of a, don't don't laugh at me just yet, but told the story of a man, in brackets: Irish. Some would say it was self-penned. Who couldn't tell a woman how he felt about her. But yet he sat and waited for her to arrive in a sort of a hamster wheel where she would never come, because he could never say the three magic words, and he could never say the three magic words. But yet he still sat and waited. And I think that sort of evoked a different kind of, an emotion. But at the same token, again, only temporary but fascinating when you go from the sort of darkness of the light, walk across water and come to the far side and, and sit down and realise that you're sort of left in this sort of poignant world of your own.
But, you know, the example we would take from that Kate and give to, I think gardens we've done for, not for show for - in inverted commas: normal clients or normal gardens, if I may, is that sometimes they decide, look, we want to have people over for dinner. We want six people, eight people, and we want them to not notice the clock moving.
And my point to them is like, if we can do that at a show and make you weep for the right reason, you know, in the case of the veterans certainly did get the message out there, and it's conveyed in the medium done extremely well for them. But I think if we can do that in a show, then we can do it in a domestic back garden to a lesser degree or to a more jovial, happier, happiness to stay longer with friends sort of degrees.

Kate
Goodness. So garden design is art really. That's what you're talking about.

Peter
It's not always Kate, I think. And you kind of say, you know yourself from what you've done in TV. Sometimes it's taken a very practical, solution, but practical again, to, quote my sisters, all four of them will tell you practical are flat shoes at a at a wedding and they never looked sexy. And my sisters would very much rather go through the pain barrier with the high heels on the whole day. So that look great in the photographs. And I think if you've got sort of accessibility requirements and we had one of the television programmes we did where, a mum, had gone into, to obviously have a child, there were some difficulties in birth. She came out a year and a half later from the hospital, had never seen… had never put her own child to bed and to be, polite about my wording here, and apologies in advance. Ultimately, mum had to learn how to speak, read, walk everything all over again. The complications were a little bit more difficult. The bit that's important, I think Kate, is that she wanted to go in the front door. These were the notes we got, go in the front door and be able to put her children to bed.
They were two requests that I got as a brief. And, when we looked at it with designing just the front garden here. I remember presenting the set of designs, and we took a photograph of a local pub where they had wheelchair accessibility, which is a ramp going up, turns at 90 degrees, turns again at 90 degrees, turns again at 90 degrees and goes in, we mapped it on the same as one of the doctor surgeries that we know, which has the same 90 degree, 90, 90 degree bends or 3 x 90 degree bends. And we mapped it over the local hospital and they were all the same. And I said, the point I made to the guys was - look, this woman… if I'm if I'm responsible for this, then she's not leaving a hospital after a year and a half to go up the hospital ramp to go in where she's supposed to feel like she's at home. And that front garden was designed so well that if you drove past the house, you wouldn't even know the ramp was there.
And it's not done in 90 degrees. It's curved up through a front garden. So it's… But that's the bit where taking something practical and making it not feel…

Kate
Making it beautiful

Peter
Yes, ultimately. And that if that's a daydream, then maybe it's a very practical one.
But I think it's a balance of the example of what you're able to do. If you have the right people by your side. Again.

Phil
What you're saying there, Peter, about the storytelling that you're incorporating within the gardens, you’re designing is absolutely amazing. And I found it quite emotional actually listening to what you were saying. That and really insightful. It's the thought process that you go through in designing the gardens. You know, and especially the veterans one that you were saying about was, absolutely fascinating.

Peter
I think. I think look, it does it's not always that way, to be Phil. And sometimes the remit of the designer is to say, in the case of a 17th century estate, a front of house, you never try and compete with the building. Your job is to sort of complement it. You’re the pair of shoes or the pair of earrings, but you're not the you're not the dress, if that makes sense.
And you don't try and compete with that, you just try and compliment it . And sometimes it is that simple. But when that landscape is done incorrectly to a stately home, or are a manor, or the domain phonetically spelt, that's when you sort of start to hear maybe more about something you shouldn't. And so a lot of the times the remit is, this is the building. We've done our research. You do your job, Peter, and there you go and look tender, they’re good people. And it's a nice home. But that doesn't steal the media limelight, I guess, where the odd time you're humble enough to be allowed to design a garden to deal with what is a very difficult subject. And the funny part in the Melbourne thing is, once they accepted the design, knew what it was about, they'd already made it the featured show garden that year, with a television producer coming to the, garden, and it was a couple of hours before we opened for judging.
You've obviously got nine days to build an entire garden, and you can… your listeners can Google the garden when they're listening to this are after another time, but there's a whole grass roof that the parts of the gutters fallen down. I loosely based it upon Dad when Mam had passed. And so he meant to fix it. But it's the water’s not coming into the house, so that's okay. And the grass is a little bit sticking out the side, and he should have cut the plants back sort of a year or two beforehand, but it can wait. The grass should have been put about three weeks beforehand. Nicole, Martin's daughter, had researched the original sweets. The original coffees, the original tobaccos from sort of 1981 to 84 to the point that in 30 odd degrees heat. We had only put the roof on about an hour or two beforehand, and I got the leaf blower and I ran it up the path, close the door behind me and left it and let the dust all settled. But we left all the jars sort of slightly open, and I'll never forget. The producer walked in the door and she… tears start coming to her eyes, and we hadn't even told her what the garden was about. And she said: My God, this just this reminds me of my grandma. It smells like my granddad's house. And that that that culmination of scents and smells and memories and family photographs and, wood shavings on the floor and old tools, all original and most of them family, pieces. And outside they'd found this old radio, and was an AFL game playing.
And she sat down in the old rocking chair with the tobacco, sort of by the side, because all of the men would have smoked at the time. And, I turned on the radio for her. And the radio was so old, she said to me, what, what years this AFL game? I said, no, that's live, that's today. And she just closed her eyes and the tears sort of came again.
And that's one of the folks when you got into the garden. But when you stood to the outside, I guess the visiting public saw it as well. And so, yeah, but difficult. Not easy. Not easy to watch, not easy to see. But I think when you see young children come and smile. And mom was saying, give me a sort of a little wink and then sort of moving on.
Then, you know, then the grown ups sort of came back a little bit later on. Yeah. Than then. Yes.

Phil
Yeah. No, that's really evocative. Yes. Amazing. So as a garden designer, I guess biodiversity and then encouraging biodiversity into green spaces within urban environments is quite is really important. How do you, sort of manage that, especially when you're trying to deal with your designs, with the demands of your client as well? I mean, do you try and incorporate biodiversity and, and bring that into your designs, or is it is that an, lower priority for you?

Peter
It's just there's two answers for you, Phil. I'm, I'm choosing my words slightly carefully here. So there's just genuinely two answers to this. So when, if I take an I’ll stick with the the gardens that we had done in France, the first garden of France was probably one of the, in inverted commas: greenest gardens we've ever designed.
But the headline wasn't biodiversity. The headline was the centenary of the ending of the First World War, but now that time has sort of passed and the inauguration some and the embassies have sort of, done their job, I guess. When I'm speaking about that garden, the reality is I can I'll tell you now, there was no soil removed off site, and that, not one inch, all stone was sourced locally. All the contractors were sourced locally. All of the plant material was sourced locally. They were all every single piece, it was either there or existed or was within a sort of ten kilometre range of the castle. The trick, funnily enough, this is that the beauty of it. Sometimes you look at things and they say, well, you know, everything was local.
And I'm saying in my head it looks like it was designed to show that everything was local, and that doesn't make it beautiful. And when the local tag is pulled off, the design or over the front door of the garden, the fictitious front door, I think I'll go back and say what I've said before about, biodiversity or native plants or native trees or whatever remit you want to give.
If my invisible six year old daughter or our son, or I bring Kate by the hand and I go, come on, I'm going to bring you to the most romantic place in the world. And she says, this is the least romantic place in the world. And I go, but hold on a second Kate. It ticks all these biodiversity boxes and she's going. But I don't even like crochet or I, you know, gardening isn't my jazz. And that I think, the note I always make to the to the students and I'm speaking to them is be careful with the remit that you don't get them sort of rearranged. The job of a public garden is to bring people in, and if we're converted like we're the converted. It's where you host one of the best gardening podcasts, plural, both of you that I know I don't need to preach to you to be able to come more biodiverse. But the six year old or seven year old has to turn around and go, oh my God, that is amazing how they've managed to do that. That is beautiful, mum, wait until I’ve to show you this thing I've seen. Can you come with me? We went there with school and it was amazing. And that's the trick to it. And if I bring a group of 6 or 16 year olds to a more biodiverse park and I bore the pants of them, then the fear and I've been choice my words.
But there's a balance necessarily, where you don't bore the pants of a sort of 6 to 16 year old when you're trying to woo them into the industry. And we, I guess, or maybe some TV personalities tend to write an article once annually in the Telegraph or the Mail saying young people should garden more. And whenever I see that which is annually, then I sort of say in my head, well, hold on a second, what 6 or 16 year old is reading the Daily Mail? Number one. Or the Telegraph? I'm not being disrespectful to the newspaper, but if you're but if you're not reading the newspaper, then you're certainly not reading the gardening section. So that's that part out of the way. So now it's just self PR, if I may. If you bring it back to the gardens there, most people will tell you who get into gardens.
I know I'm segueing off the biodiversity thing slightly, apologies Phil. But most young people who are people who are in the industry today will tell you, my grandfather, or there was one school teacher or I remember listening to an interview, or I saw a guy doing this and I was amazed by it. And in gardening, sometimes I think we do the thing that makes us smile, he says, I'm also guilty of it. And at the same token, you forget that sometimes your job is also to, play the guitar with your eyes closed and other people go. That is, I need to learn how to play guitar Mam, can I have one of them for Christmas? And when Alex Higgins was playing snooker or when, the Lionesses won the World Cup or whatever the case may be, you've get to turn around and go, I want, I want the jersey. I want the snooker cue, I want the whatever the case would be.
I think in the sense of answering your question, biodiversity is hugely important. We would try and hide it into gardens where they haven't discussed it with us and but it's not doesn't sometimes need to be so obvious and sometimes equally it does.

Kate
Goodness me. That's quite an answer.

Phil
I mean, what you're saying there about, trying to encourage young people into gardening and that side of things is an inspiration, isn't it? You want to inspire them from what they're seeing, to then want to further their knowledge and get into it that way. Peter, many of the new builds nowadays are actually limited. With the amount of outdoor space that they provide to each house is provided. How could you overcome those constraints to, sort of create a meaningful green space.

Peter
I understand the question.

Phil
It’s not an easy answer.

Peter
No. Okay. Well, it came up in conversation, about three, four weeks ago, we were talking with, a friend of mine, and he was saying he wants to get an apple tree, but the apple tree variety, he wanted needed, pollinator. And he said, my garden won't take the two apple trees. And I said, well, why don't you just buy one for your next door neighbour?
And he went. Yeah, okay. And that's.. I mean, it's not it's not rocket science. It's just an extra £20. He went next door, he went – hey Jim, I bought you an apple tree, installed, or I’ll plant it out your back garden whilst you're away on holidays and put a bow on it. And now everybody wins. And I get that, I think, I think the best gardens and small spaces I've seen. If you take these two gardens, one of them being my friends who's bought a tree, who has to decide how he's going to present it to his neighbour because he's afraid he's going to leave it in the pot and so I replant it for him. Or he doesn't look. The best landscapes I've seen have almost got invisible dividing lines between each other’s garden.
The worst are probably where the soil is brutal. The whole back garden is porcelain paved and fake grass paved. The pleached trees goes in and the raised walls go in. And you can see the pictures are ten a penny on Instagram. The reality is, we had a consultation with a lady of recent and the fake grass aside, the porcelain paving aside for now, the pleached trees that she had were Quercus which is oak, and they're standing at 3.5m tall before the first, I guess before the first branches sort of go out.
And the conversation I'm having with a couple of friends of mine were… if she goes away on holidays for, say, three years and doesn't have a long handled lopping shears or a six metre tall A-framed ladder to maintain those trees, they are going to turn into normal trees, and it is going to be an absolute field day for tree surgeons if that comes to the fore. And so to go full circle away from that. What I'm saying is if the, the best gardens that I know are those where they've got somebody in to say, maintain the state. We are brought in in this case mentioned to consult with the sort of association and what the association decided upon was they needed to do something to make the estate better for the planet.
And also they didn't want people coddling our Tarmacadaming or whatever, blocking in the entire surface of the front garden. They wanted it to be greener, in inverted commas. And so we came up with a plan where we sort of had a list of say, I’m being facetious here, but I'll shorten it down for you to say about 30, 50 plants that would look good in a small front garden.
And we had about ten trees that would fit out your back garden, and you could pick one tree and five of them, or 17 of them, or 12 of them, and you could have your garden designed like that, that, that, that, that's all front garden sort of did a job. But once we went past say 20% of the houses using that list of 30 plants, we then changed to a next 30 and a tree sort of similar.
So you've got some that's coming in now to flower, say in October, November, December, you've got the plants that are coming in that this sort of time of year, you've got the bulbs that are coming up in the main areas, you've got the larger trees out in the main open areas, and the whole thing had some sort of a system to it and it just clicked and it works and it works beautifully.
But if you turn around and go, okay, nope, I live here, I close my front door and that's it. Deliver my post. I'll go to work, see it tomorrow. No interest. Then you've got a series of maybe leaning towards more individuals where the gardens are usually lower maintenance. And the thing we know we as an industry know about lower maintenance if, houses or homes or apartments are of a transient nature where people sort of move on, then the renter nor the rentee invests too much or too heavily into what will cost them money to maintain or inverted commas, not be looked after.
If we go to a higher end, renting payment or a higher end value home building, then we tend to find the remit is slightly different because they want people to stay longer. And then we're back full circle on that again. And it ticks the box. And we know if you're sitting in the park and you've got the sound of birds, nature and mental health and wellbeing and all of those, not to be disrespectful in any way, but you're ticking all of those boxes, then people tend to stay longer.
And as I would say to the to the young students, there's a reason why the woman who you fall in love with, or the man who you fall in love and who you go to get married, it's not in a retail car park where you've got a TK Maxx sign or a B&Q sign in the background. It's always or invariably, poetically, he says in the daydream to that 17th Century domain, which is filled with trees and sounds of the birds.
And you walk in the door and you don't know why, but you go, oh my God, this is lovely. And that's exactly it. So as eloquent as I can say it, there's a very simple answer. I'm not I'm not a fan of one, but there's sometimes just not a lot I could do about it. But we try.

Phil
Yeah. But I mean that's interesting. So I like the idea what you were saying about collaboration, you know, I mean, you may gave the example about the apple tree, but also I think just, between houses and having sort of a common, sort of planting system or something where, where things are shared and you're creating more of an environment, not just your pocket handkerchiefs sized environment, but a much larger environment as well.

Peter
But it's funny, Phil, that I don't want to call it a sales pitch, because that's the wrong way to do it. Or the wrong way to say it. That the reality is my note to the to the association, if I might call them that. A group of really wonderful, forward thinking, bright minded, intelligent people who owns their own home as individuals.
My opening line to them was referencing one of my clients, whose note to me on a regular basis is make my wife smile and add value to my property. And the point I made to them very simply was it's not rocket science. Like Sarah Beeny had done it as a TV program, a long time ago where she took a street somewhere, London-shire, anyway, and they painted the front of all of the walls, sort of in three different colour schemes, and they all look sort of the same.
And how it added value to the property. They redid the front gardens. So this has been around since time began, and in this case here the thing became well and how much is it going to cost us. And then the question became, well, how much value does of that to your property? And once we turn around and go, look, it's going to cost you, I don't know, $12 on it or €1,000 or whatever the case may be.
It was then we brought in the auctioneer, and he sat down with them and said, If Peter does this and if the painter guy does this, your house will increase by approximately… And I went, oh. So now without being, you know, taken away to the good of all the things that we're doing, I don't mind why they put it in. I sleep better, but it's gone in that I'm clever enough to ring a friend of mine, or a guy who I know who owns an auctioneer store sort of locally and say, would you mind coming in and having a chat with these people to explain monetarily what it will do. Then will I make them smile? Yes. Will it add value to your property? Yes. Now It's a worthwhile investment. I understand that it's their money, but it's, unfortunately, it's not always the case that I think a group of people with small back gardens of their own realised well actually we’re one part of one greater landscape.

Kate
I’m going to ask on that, hopefully is simple. It might take you a little while to think of it, but do you have a plant or a flower that will always put a smile on your face, one that you just you can't be without? However or whatever your feeling that plant a flower will just lift your spirits.

Peter
Jeez okay. There's one tree that I think I've only ever planted two of, Kate. And it's a long word. Let a + Laburnocytisus 'adamii'. And so it's got the long pendulum flowers of the laburnum. Anybody knows or Googles Laburnum. whaterii at the end. Double ii I think it is. And you'll get these 14 inch long sort of pendulums of yellow flowers and, plus laburnocytisus adamii they’re purple, yellow and mauve flower where it's got the three of them on the one plant. And the first time I saw one, I went, oh, my God, this is rock and roll stuff to a 16 year old geeky kid in Cliff Richard corduroy trousers, who looked like a younger Jarvis Cocker. And I've, only ever been humble to plant two of them sort of since and I think that probably I'd have to say it's the first, it's like the first time hearing Hendrix. There you get it or you don't. And they never do… laburnum never do what they're told or they're wonky trees or not Betula jack montii, I they always go with a kink. They look brilliant as an avenue, but always tip in sort of naturally, it's just a question of which way they'll go. So. Yeah, I think that's a good question. Great question. Actually.

Phil
Excellent. Right. Well, I think that just about wraps things up, to be honest with Peter. So, I just like to say thank you so much for your time. And, we've really enjoyed talking to you. It's been absolutely fascinating finding out about what you do and just the storytelling that you're weaving into the garden designs, it’s just amazing. So yeah, thank you so much.

Kate
Your imagination and your storytelling is just beautiful. So thank you for sharing your story with us.

Peter
Thank you so much Kate. And thank you Phil. Genuine, humbled, honoured and huge fan as you're well aware. And, thanks for having me on. I've fulfilled this and a Blue Peter badge. Were about the only two things that really eclipsed my career, and I've just t icked one of them off the box.