IRISH garden designer Peter Donegan will return to the Melbourne Flower Show next month with a garden that honours the lives of air force veterans.
Last year the Dublin-born designer competed in Melbourne for the first time – and became the first Irish person to win a medal at the prestigious Australian event.
His 2023 installation The Bam Stone was one of only five to receive the Gold Show Garden Award at the competition.
The 200 square metre show garden was constructed by Melbourne-based Semken Landscaping, who are the most medalled contractor in the flower show's history.
The Bam Stone boasted the designer’s contemporary vision of a love story, depicting two hearts separated by a small island off the coast of Galway to the mainland.
Peter Donegan returns to the prestigious Melbourne show next monthIt quickly became popular among the 120,000 visitors to the Melbourne show, which took place at world heritage site The Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens.
This year Donegan returns with an entirely new feature garden concept for the show, which returns to the same venue and kicks off on March 20.
He will once again team up with the Melbourne-based landscape contractor Semken on his installation, A Moment in Time.
“A Moment in Time – Presented by Daisy’s Garden Supplies is the story of a veteran air force pilot who returns to a place he hoped to be able to recall home and remains as if he had never left,” Donegan explains.
“The design aims to show what is when there is no head stone to one who has not fallen and, though a body is not lost, there remains a mind that can never be the same as it was prior.”
Peter Donegan's featured show garden for the Melbourne Flower Show 2024, A Moment in TimeHe added: “The garden features a fragmented path winding to an aged, grassed roof wood cabin and a Piper PA-28 Cherokee plane, the project that once was a wished for return to flight of a then younger man, not complete in its repair or trajectory stalled by tree growth over time, stimulated only by the turbulence of what comes with the witness of conflict.”
Set in South-Eastern Australia in the early 1980’s, the garden intends to “highlight the difficulties some veterans may face when returning to their former lives or when trying to create a new path post service in the Air Force”, Donegan confirms.
Last year Donegan became the first Irish landscape architect invited and accepted to design at the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show, which is the Southern Hemisphere’s largest and most prestigious flower show.
As well as being the designer selected to create the 2024 show’s featured garden, Donegan also returns to the Melbourne competition as a garden judge.
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