Roscommon roots bear fruit at London Garden Festival

A Navan born architect, whose mother, Mary, is originally from Ballaghaderreen, recently made history at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival by winning five major awards for his garden entry, ‘Subaru Cocoon’.

Mike McMahon and his wife Jewlsy Matthews took the prestigious London garden festival by storm, winning gold and being awarded for Best Construction, Best Show Garden and for Environmental Innovation.

Feedback from the judges was excellent according to Mike. “When we had feedback from the judges, one of the judges, who has been doing it for years, said she could count on one hand the number of times someone has got as high a score as we did for our garden.” 

No one had ever won all four awards together before. The pinnacle of the awards received by the couple was the Tudor Rose Award, so prestigious that Mike admitted, “I had never seen it before, it comes out so seldom.

"The Tudor Rose Award is a measure of excellence, they might not hand it out for a couple of years but if a garden scores really high score or they think it’s really unusual or innovative garden, they award it,” said Mike.

A central theme of the Subaru Cocoon is sustainability. The garden incorporates recycled materials and the ‘Jelly Wall’, a traditional Indian structure taking inspiration from Jewlsy’s heritage. It uses 4,500 Kenoteq K-Briqs- the world’s most sustainable brick.

As the only Irish representation at the competition, Mike wanted to highlight the deterioration of Ireland and the UK’s temperate rainforests in his garden. The rare ecosystems that contain mosses, lichens and epiphytes now only cover less than one per cent of land.

Mike moved to London in 2007. His mother Mary (originally Hannon), hails from Ballaghaderreen, and she credits her own mother with playing a big part in Mike’s nature interest.

“My mother was a huge influence on him. He was only saying it the day he was getting the awards and the medals,” said Mary.

Mrs Hannon, who was vice-principal of the Sisters of Charity primary school in Ballaghaderreen was always into nature, according to Mary.

“Her classroom was full of leaves and the nature table. No child left her class without knowing the name of all the common trees.” Mike’s award winning garden transported his mother to her childhood in County Roscommon. “When I was a child I used to play around the woods and the bogs of Ballaghaderreen, and there was a place with these tree trunks where we always used to play. He has massive tree trunks in his garden that looked like as if they were there forever, and I said, that reminds me so much of my childhood.” 

Mike has extended his gratitude to Subaru UK and Big Fish Landscapes for their support of the garden.

The garden will now undergo a sensitive redesign before being permanently located at Horatio’s Garden and serve as a therapeutic space for people with spinal injuries.

Horatio’s Garden nurtures the wellbeing of people after spinal injury in beautiful, vibrant sanctuaries within the heart of NHS spinal injury centres. Leading designers create the accessible gardens where the charity’s team, alongside volunteers and creatives, care for people and plants alike.