Dialogue for RTÉ's Capital D Feature

Peter Donegan:

I’m Peter Donegan, I own a landscape design company, we’ve been in business seven years.

At 31 years old I found I was getting a bit bottle necked into rejuvenating early historical gardens which is great fun but I think every man needs a change from his daily life. We wanted to go somewhere a little bit different that we’d never gone before so we built this garden on the basis that we’d put it up to go for Chelsea garden show and in the mean time Bord Bia got in touch and asked would we like to submit an entry for bloom in the Phoenix park. I came up with this idea of every Irish man’s dream of building or rebuilding a vintage car but never actually finishing it. It should look from the roadside like a normal Irish garden that you have a car, an unfinished project, hidden down the back and when you arrive down you’ve got a little hidden Aladdin’s cave for either the grown man or the family.

John Friel, BDF Commercials:

This is just a past time. Some people play golf, we fix cars. We were sitting down in a pub somewhere just discussing the problems of the world and Peter decided he had the idea of using a car as a garden and that he’d like to get a Morris Minor. So I said, fair enough, I’ll give you one but it won’t be a good one. We got one and Peter did what ever he needed to do to it. Then decided it was a very good idea and it was turning out ok. So we decided then to get a better one and we would restore it back to near enough reasonable condition, not road worthy and cut it and he would make a garden feature out of it which I thought was a good idea for a Morris Minor.

Everything in the car is still original, it has all it’s original chromes, lights, bootlids, even it’s registration plates, axles, everything is totally original.

Peter:

The top of the pops style smoke machine with smoke pouring through the grill is what we’re going for, as if the head gasket is gone. When you sit inside you’ll have a plasma screen television and I’d say we’ll have a small fridge or coffee machine in the back with a nice entertainment system built in to right underneath the steering wheel area.

The bill on the plants at the moment is standing at €80,000. I’d say actual cost on paper are somewhere around €150,000.

Garden Centre employee:

At the beginning of the whole bloom project Peter came to us and said he wanted to do one of the gardens in it and wanted to know if we would be able to give him assistance or combine with him on the project and we felt we were very happy to do that. People years ago would have done their own gardening, but, we’ve found in the last ten years there’s a massive growth in the amount of people who’ll pay to have their garden done rather than go out and do it themselves. Your average back garden, or front and back garden, in a housing estate you could spend up to €20,000 or €30,000 on.

Directly ourselves up to €750,000, €800,000. I know of gardens that have been over €1,000,000 in the last few years, that’s big money.

Peter:

That might sound like crazy, crazy money and in some ways it is but I also know people who spend €250,000 on cars and a garden will last you a little bit longer.

(The Beatles song, Baby Drive my Car begins to play in the background.)

I was always a fan of 60’s, 70’s music, The Beatles, the Rubber Soul Album tied in with the plasma screen TV, we should have video and audio for people to see how it works and what the garden’s all about. I think it’s suitable that it’s no rubber soul, you can drive my car, but you actually can’t.

It’s a labour of love and you need to be mad to get into it. To spend four months restoring a car to go into a garden, you need to be mad, to ask that question in the first place you need to be super mad. Gardening’s a passion and combined with John’s it’s worked quite well.

I think everyone’s had to opportunity to sit on the back seat of a car with someone they love. I think it should appeal to the couples and the family more so than the individual. I think the major coo for us would be to get the peoples choice award garden and that would be something special. It’s great to build great gardens but it’s another thing to build an odd garden or a crazy garden that everyone falls a bit in love with, that reminisces or associates themselves with, that would be a major coo for me personally.

(Music fades out.)