Few activities speak to the human experience quite so closely as gardening. Planting seeds of opportunity, reaping what you sow, adapting to changing seasons: there are many metaphors in gardening that help us find meaning in the complexities and challenges of life.
Nobody believes this more than Linda McKeown, a trained horticultural therapist and a long-standing designer at Bord Bia’s Bloom. Linda meets Irish Country Living on a lovely day in May during ‘the build’ – the weeks in the run-up to Ireland’s biggest gardening festival, when white tents are being propped up in Phoenix Park and designers are starting to realise the concepts of their garden. “I love this part of it,” Linda says, taking off her pink cap, “even though it’s a bit stressful.”
Linda is travelling up and down from her native Belfast during the build but will stay in Dublin for the five days of the festival.
As we walk around the rectangular Victorian walled garden, Linda says: “Everybody should have access to a garden. They benefit your physical and mental health and create space where you can meet other people.”
The idea that the garden is a space of connection underpins Linda’s work in garden therapy – a practice that involves engaging individuals in gardening to promote mental health and wellness – and leads the way when it comes to her designs at Bloom.
This is Linda’s seventh garden at Bloom and this year’s design is with Make-A-Wish Ireland, a charity which works with children with critical illnesses and their families, granting them a wish they always wanted.
“Each year, I get a further insight into the practicalities of building a show garden – how timings are crucial, what short cuts you can make and ones you definitely can’t, and the availability of flowering plants,” says Linda. Last year, she was awarded a Gold Medal for her garden sponsored by St James’s Hospital highlighting hereditary cancer.
Linda McKeown's 2025 design for her show garden sponsored by Make-A-Wish Ireland, the children's charity.
Linda describes her 2025 design as “very circular with a central space and a pergola that is surrounded by silver birch trees. The backdrop is lots of purples, blues, whites and pale pinks. There is some nice planting between the concrete pavers.
“I love using concrete in the garden, but in a certain way so it’s softened by plants. The structure is there and that contemporary feeling is there, but it’s not all straight lines and walls. The best way to see the beauty of a wild and naturalistic planting palette is to put it against something that is more structured. The contrast really works.”
The garden incorporates Linda’s two favourite species: the silver birch tree and Nepeta (catmint). “It’s a lovely herbaceous perennial, and it grows quite big. The bees love it. When I plant it at the show, within literally 10 minutes the bees are all over it,” she says with a smile.
Growing up
When visitors walk around the show gardens at Bloom, there is always a breathless awe at the beauty and detail around them. “It’s great to see the enthusiasm in people,” says Linda. “At the show, you’ll get a lot of people who are gardeners, but you’ll also get a lot of people who just come for a day out and they’ll ask: ‘How do you do that?’
“People think it’s like witchcraft or a bit of voodoo,” she laughs. “Like how could I possibly ever do that?”
This is also a feeling that Linda identifies as one of her earliest memories which gave her an appreciation for gardening at a young age. “My dad went to Paris with some friends, and he brought home a postcard of the Gardens of Versailles. There were really ornate gardens and I remember thinking, ‘someone has actually done that’”.
Linda went on to train as a horticulturist when she was in her 20s, and it was only during lockdown – a time when many of us were connecting with nature on a deeper level – that she became more involved with garden therapy.
“I was delivering horticultural sessions with people who had an acquired brain injury. People were getting so much more out of it from a different angle.
“There is so much benefit even from the act of sowing seeds.
“I got very interested in it so I retrained and did a diploma in social and therapeutic horticulture with Thrive, a gardening for health charity in the UK. I travelled back and forth to the UK for two years and finished that in 2023.”
Now half of Linda’s week is spent designing private gardens, and the other half is working with adults with learning disabilities for an organisation called L’Arche, Belfast. She works with programme participants of all ages and abilities in a large allotment in the Castlereagh hills. The focus is on fruit and vegetable growing, and there is a kitchen on site where people can cook what they grow.
Linda is a big fan of edible gardens: “It’s about associating the outdoors with every part of the being: how it looks, how you can feed yourself, how you can nourish your whole self from a garden.”
Bloom Make-A-Wish Garden. \ Claire Nash
Disabilities and dementia
Linda also designs gardens for people with disabilities or people who live with dementia. “A wheelchair user or someone with lesser mobility should still have a garden that is beautiful or that they can share with family and friends. You shouldn’t need to have a garden with obvious ramps, we can adapt everything and design
gardens with paths, level surfaces, raised and curved surfaces.
“I also work with people who have poor mental health, and if they plant a seed and they see it growing, they think, this is great. It flowers, it starts to die back at the end of the season, and they get hope from the fact that that flower will produce another seed. It’s like the circle of life.”
It is that time in the garden, when everything starts to go into decline, that Linda loves the most – ironic as we are meeting in the fullness of summer.
“I love autumn because of the colours and I love the garden in winter too. It’s so still,” Linda pauses and gestures around the walled garden with its structured borders and rows. “If you take this garden – you’ve got these evergreen hedges and the old walls, but in the summer, you hardly notice any of this because of all the colourful flowers. This garden will look completely different in winter, and you’ll really see the bones of the garden, the skeleton paths, the hedges.”
No matter which season is your favourite, Linda encourages people to plant for all of them. “Don’t just plant tulips because then your garden will be a spring garden. If you plant for the seasons, it’s like a new garden every time. I definitely think that seasonal gardens are the best type, because you have all the new growth – the new green in spring, then you’ve got summer, and it’s just so abundant and then autumn comes, and it’s beautiful.”
Not everyone has the space of the sprawling garden where we’re having our chat, but Linda is an advocate for utilising small spaces. “Some people only have a window box or a tiny yard, but they are just growing things. Now is the time you should be growing any sort of vegetables. You should be planting all of your seeds, even if it is in a window box. Herbs, chives, anything that’ll grow.”
Linda and her sister also have allotments in a community garden in Belfast, where there is a burgeoning network of communal growing spaces. “The community garden network in Belfast is brilliant. It’s about people coming together. Someone might say, I’ve got too much of this seed or I’ve got a load of this plant. Somebody else will say, I’ll take a bit of that. That’s the way it was years and years ago whenever your parents would have got a cutting from the next-door neighbour’s garden.”
The community garden network in Belfast is brilliant. It’s about people coming together.
Where you can save money swapping seeds, Linda’s advice is to invest it in soil and compost. “You need good garden compost to feed the soil. If you feed your soil, you’ll have healthy, happy plants. It’s like the saying: spend a pound on the hole and a penny on the plant.”
As she returns to her task of building her own show garden, Linda leaves us with a message: “Try not to think of your garden as a burden because if you do, you’ll never be happy with it. Keep it simple and keep it to what you can manage, even if you can only manage 10 minutes per day.”
And if things go wrong? “It’s not the end of the world,” she smiles.
“You’ll always learn something new every day, you’ll never know everything about gardening.
“The garden is a great teacher, and a forgiving one.”
Few activities speak to the human experience quite so closely as gardening. Planting seeds of opportunity, reaping what you sow, adapting to changing seasons: there are many metaphors in gardening that help us find meaning in the complexities and challenges of life.
Nobody believes this more than Linda McKeown, a trained horticultural therapist and a long-standing designer at Bord Bia’s Bloom. Linda meets Irish Country Living on a lovely day in May during ‘the build’ – the weeks in the run-up to Ireland’s biggest gardening festival, when white tents are being propped up in Phoenix Park and designers are starting to realise the concepts of their garden. “I love this part of it,” Linda says, taking off her pink cap, “even though it’s a bit stressful.”
Linda is travelling up and down from her native Belfast during the build but will stay in Dublin for the five days of the festival.
As we walk around the rectangular Victorian walled garden, Linda says: “Everybody should have access to a garden. They benefit your physical and mental health and create space where you can meet other people.”
The idea that the garden is a space of connection underpins Linda’s work in garden therapy – a practice that involves engaging individuals in gardening to promote mental health and wellness – and leads the way when it comes to her designs at Bloom.
This is Linda’s seventh garden at Bloom and this year’s design is with Make-A-Wish Ireland, a charity which works with children with critical illnesses and their families, granting them a wish they always wanted.
“Each year, I get a further insight into the practicalities of building a show garden – how timings are crucial, what short cuts you can make and ones you definitely can’t, and the availability of flowering plants,” says Linda. Last year, she was awarded a Gold Medal for her garden sponsored by St James’s Hospital highlighting hereditary cancer.
Linda McKeown's 2025 design for her show garden sponsored by Make-A-Wish Ireland, the children's charity.
Linda describes her 2025 design as “very circular with a central space and a pergola that is surrounded by silver birch trees. The backdrop is lots of purples, blues, whites and pale pinks. There is some nice planting between the concrete pavers.
“I love using concrete in the garden, but in a certain way so it’s softened by plants. The structure is there and that contemporary feeling is there, but it’s not all straight lines and walls. The best way to see the beauty of a wild and naturalistic planting palette is to put it against something that is more structured. The contrast really works.”
The garden incorporates Linda’s two favourite species: the silver birch tree and Nepeta (catmint). “It’s a lovely herbaceous perennial, and it grows quite big. The bees love it. When I plant it at the show, within literally 10 minutes the bees are all over it,” she says with a smile.
Growing up
When visitors walk around the show gardens at Bloom, there is always a breathless awe at the beauty and detail around them. “It’s great to see the enthusiasm in people,” says Linda. “At the show, you’ll get a lot of people who are gardeners, but you’ll also get a lot of people who just come for a day out and they’ll ask: ‘How do you do that?’
“People think it’s like witchcraft or a bit of voodoo,” she laughs. “Like how could I possibly ever do that?”
This is also a feeling that Linda identifies as one of her earliest memories which gave her an appreciation for gardening at a young age. “My dad went to Paris with some friends, and he brought home a postcard of the Gardens of Versailles. There were really ornate gardens and I remember thinking, ‘someone has actually done that’”.
Linda went on to train as a horticulturist when she was in her 20s, and it was only during lockdown – a time when many of us were connecting with nature on a deeper level – that she became more involved with garden therapy.
“I was delivering horticultural sessions with people who had an acquired brain injury. People were getting so much more out of it from a different angle.
“There is so much benefit even from the act of sowing seeds.
“I got very interested in it so I retrained and did a diploma in social and therapeutic horticulture with Thrive, a gardening for health charity in the UK. I travelled back and forth to the UK for two years and finished that in 2023.”
Now half of Linda’s week is spent designing private gardens, and the other half is working with adults with learning disabilities for an organisation called L’Arche, Belfast. She works with programme participants of all ages and abilities in a large allotment in the Castlereagh hills. The focus is on fruit and vegetable growing, and there is a kitchen on site where people can cook what they grow.
Linda is a big fan of edible gardens: “It’s about associating the outdoors with every part of the being: how it looks, how you can feed yourself, how you can nourish your whole self from a garden.”
Bloom Make-A-Wish Garden. \ Claire Nash
Disabilities and dementia
Linda also designs gardens for people with disabilities or people who live with dementia. “A wheelchair user or someone with lesser mobility should still have a garden that is beautiful or that they can share with family and friends. You shouldn’t need to have a garden with obvious ramps, we can adapt everything and design
gardens with paths, level surfaces, raised and curved surfaces.
“I also work with people who have poor mental health, and if they plant a seed and they see it growing, they think, this is great. It flowers, it starts to die back at the end of the season, and they get hope from the fact that that flower will produce another seed. It’s like the circle of life.”
It is that time in the garden, when everything starts to go into decline, that Linda loves the most – ironic as we are meeting in the fullness of summer.
“I love autumn because of the colours and I love the garden in winter too. It’s so still,” Linda pauses and gestures around the walled garden with its structured borders and rows. “If you take this garden – you’ve got these evergreen hedges and the old walls, but in the summer, you hardly notice any of this because of all the colourful flowers. This garden will look completely different in winter, and you’ll really see the bones of the garden, the skeleton paths, the hedges.”
No matter which season is your favourite, Linda encourages people to plant for all of them. “Don’t just plant tulips because then your garden will be a spring garden. If you plant for the seasons, it’s like a new garden every time. I definitely think that seasonal gardens are the best type, because you have all the new growth – the new green in spring, then you’ve got summer, and it’s just so abundant and then autumn comes, and it’s beautiful.”
Not everyone has the space of the sprawling garden where we’re having our chat, but Linda is an advocate for utilising small spaces. “Some people only have a window box or a tiny yard, but they are just growing things. Now is the time you should be growing any sort of vegetables. You should be planting all of your seeds, even if it is in a window box. Herbs, chives, anything that’ll grow.”
Linda and her sister also have allotments in a community garden in Belfast, where there is a burgeoning network of communal growing spaces. “The community garden network in Belfast is brilliant. It’s about people coming together. Someone might say, I’ve got too much of this seed or I’ve got a load of this plant. Somebody else will say, I’ll take a bit of that. That’s the way it was years and years ago whenever your parents would have got a cutting from the next-door neighbour’s garden.”
The community garden network in Belfast is brilliant. It’s about people coming together.
Where you can save money swapping seeds, Linda’s advice is to invest it in soil and compost. “You need good garden compost to feed the soil. If you feed your soil, you’ll have healthy, happy plants. It’s like the saying: spend a pound on the hole and a penny on the plant.”
As she returns to her task of building her own show garden, Linda leaves us with a message: “Try not to think of your garden as a burden because if you do, you’ll never be happy with it. Keep it simple and keep it to what you can manage, even if you can only manage 10 minutes per day.”
And if things go wrong? “It’s not the end of the world,” she smiles.
“You’ll always learn something new every day, you’ll never know everything about gardening.
“The garden is a great teacher, and a forgiving one.”
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