w|ė MAGAZINE June Editorial by Leonie Cornelius

Colin Gillen

Bloom Wild: The Dream Gardens Bloom Special

Welcome to the fourth issue of the w|ėMAGAZINE which aims to bring you wildly beautiful inspiration and joy straight yo your inbox the first Sunday of every month. This month to coincide with Bloom in the Park 2021 which is happening virtually again we have a super exciting special in store for you. In our editorial feature we look at what it means to design dream gardens and how to make design truly about you and your passions and joys. We also have seven exciting designer Dream Gardens from some incredible designers at this years Bloom festival which focus on different orientations and climatic conditions… there is a garden idea for everyone and it’s jam packed full of inspiration, planting scheme ideas and easy to follow ideas. And last but not least we add some fun wild living recommendations for you to add to your lives everyday to the magazine throughout the month of June. Let’s go Bloom 🌿

EDITORIAL : DREAM GARDENS by Leonie Cornelius

“Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are”

Alfred Austin’s very apt quote is a wonderful starting point to consider when thinking about your garden and how you imagine it in the future. Gardens are intensely personal places and this year’s Bloom festival sadly once again being forced to move online has me thinking about the importance of these spaces in our everyday more than ever . These spaces are, much like our homes, where our lives unfold on a day to day basis. Realistically, more often than not however, how our garden looks now has little to do with the dream we have of our perfect garden.

The disconnect between how our gardens actually are and how we would like them to be is something we are garden designers deal with on an everyday basis and also the thing which drives us. As a designer I am lucky to be invited into people’s spaces and I get to know a little about who they are and how they live their everyday lives. The idea of exploring your dreams and desires for the garden is something I consider all the time for many different clients.

Many clients ask me if a dream garden actually achievable in a real space? What about function and form and the practicalities of a garden? What of compost bins and clothes lines, maintenance and good circulation? My answer is that of course these are all vital starting points to a successful garden and core to making your space work for, not against you. They are the most basic functional elements to get right or the garden will be wrong for you.

There is however a step before the practicals that often gets forgotten about, or sometimes treated as a sideline in garden design. This is you. The question of who you are.

Think about this: what are your passions, your everyday pleasures, your style, your likes? What do you see yourself doing in your garden space? And then most of all, what are your garden dreams? At this stage I would ask you to imagine the most beautiful garden space you have ever been in and try and consider what made it so special to you? Perhaps it was a garden on holidays which made you feel free and easy and lovely? Or maybe it was your granny’s wild garden, overflowing with playful colour? The again maybe it was a public garden space, for example the Alhambra gardens in Andalusia in Spain with all its perfection and symmetries that stayed with you until now.

Whatever the space, this can become your dream garden inspiration and form the backbone of your design choices for the garden.

This is what I call the dream gardens exercise in my new book Dream Gardens and I find it is a wonderful way of identifying what your dreams for a space are going forward. These visuals are based on your personal memories and emotions you associate with those memories so they will be intensely personal. Before you start looking at the admittedly vital functional needs of a space, and even the forms for the space, I feel it is very important to study these emotional associations with our favourite space or spaces. The idea is that no matter how important reality and practicality is, we don’t want to ever lose the feel of your dream garden.

When it comes to planning designs for our lives, our initial efforts are often put into creating the best and most beautiful homes for us to live in. We tend to think from the inside out and there is a good reason for this as our homes are the places where we spend most of our time. Gardens on the other hand, are more often than not secondary spaces that are dealt with after the home design is complete. This makes sense in one way in that it is good to live with your garden for a while and get to know it before we make design decisions. On the other hand, there is plenty to be said for considering our garden an integral part of the design process with the home. Vital connections between the inside and the outside can be considered at the home build stage and many architects now like to work collaboratively with garden designers to make sure the inside is reflected in the outside and vice versa.

Your everyday Dreams

This is the perfect time to start looking at the functions of the garden and what you want it to do for you. Your garden should be a reflection of how you live on an every day basis. So, when considering your garden from a functional point of view, the best way to start is thinking about you. Think about your and your family’s likes, your hobbies, and how you use the garden. Think about how your day in the garden looks at present. You also need to consider how you would ideally like your day in the garden to be. For example, you may use the garden one or twice a week to read a book or eat outdoors with the family-and only when it does not rain. That’s what you have right now. You may however like the idea of using the garden more than that, and even when it does rain. These considerations will have an impact on what you want in your garden. A roofed pergola for shelter from the rain for example or a summerhouse for eating and reading.

Choose well, design passionately

Designing a garden at this early stage means you can make informed and well considered choices early on. Every design feature from colour to plant choices is based on your likes, your passions and your everyday needs. Creating dream gardens is not about being perfect, it’s more about being perfect for you. So, in answer to the question ‘is a dream garden actually achievable in a real space?’- Absolutely.

Garden design by Leonie Cornelius — Design by Leonie Cornelius wild ėden -photo by Colin Gillen/framelight.ie

Leonie Cornelius is an award winning garden designer and interior architect and author of the bestselling Book Dream Gardens

SPECIAL FEATURE : Dream Gardens at Bloom

In this month’s issue we feature the Easy Steps to Dream Gardens is a new initiative by Bloom by Bord Bia designed to help you plant your own show garden at home. Bord Bia has worked with seven talented Bloom award-winning show garden designers to create garden design templates that you can download exclusively from the Bloom website. Each garden design in the series comes with an easy-to-follow planting plan and detailed planting list that can be implemented in your garden according to your available time, space and budget.

ABOUT w|ė

w|ė MAGAZINE is my new online wild based lifestyle magazine which brings monthly stories, knowledge and recommendations to you, all based on a wild and beautiful approach. w|ė will explore and celebrate topics which resonate with people, to bring an awareness to current issues we face in our shared wild spaces and to connect with like-minded people globally.

There will be interviews with inspiring creatives- designers, architects, chefs, writers, psychologists, doctors, and wild thinkers, creators and dreamers. Through gardens, food, wellness, health and inspiring stories for wild living, we will also link to courses in wild design and lifestyle and have exciting news soon on creative collaborations with incredible wild inspired people and brands.

Join w|ė to celebrate a wild and beautiful lifestyle in our everyday.