Designer’s tasty salad garden pots silver medal

AT last a garden that doesn’t need mowing — just eating.

Dundalk garden designer Paul Martin has dreamed up the ideal backyard for the lazy gardener with greenery consisting almost entirely of edible salad leaves.

His creation, called Lazy Salad Days, whetted the appetites of some of the world's pickiest judges to earn him a silver medal at London's Chelsea Flower Show.

The only Irish entry in the notoriously tough contest, Mr Martin had just a week to turn a bare green space into an imaginative garden suitable for a small urban back yard in the Chic Gardens category.

In weather that had more in common with monsoon season in Bangladesh than lazy hazy salad days of summer in south east England, he and a dedicated crew of helpers from Clogher Head company, Earthworks, worked 16 hours a day to complete the garden before the judges began their rounds.

They built walls and a water feature, laid flagstones and steps, planted mature olive trees flown in specially from Italy and created seas of green out of 25 varieties of salad leaves and herbs, including rocket, chard, coriander, chives and lollo rossa.

Mr Martin also unveiled a flower never before seen in Britain a variety of alpine called Burren Nymph developed from a plant that grows in the wild in the Burren in Co Clare.

And for the truly lazy who find just admiring their handiwork exhausting, he also added two wooden sun loungers reclining on stainless steel bases that glide above the salad beds on camouflaged metal rollers that create the impression of floating.

"The judges never tell you what they give points for but I think they liked the humour in it and the fact that it's good use of space," Mr Martin, 37, explained. "We wanted to make a garden that was useful as well as relaxing and you don't get much more useful than being edible."

Mr Martin, who trained at the Botanical Gardens in Dublin before setting up his own company, said he was delighted with the medal, even though the few hundred pounds prize that accompanies it goes nowhere near to meeting the estimated €50,000 cost of the plants and building materials he had to beg, borrow and scrounge from supporters and well-wishers.

"Chelsea is the toughest show in the world so to win a medal is fantastic. It will open doors for the business and people will probably let you try out new designs which is the fun part of the job."