Root awakening

Root awakening

To landscape architect Brendan Moar, the idea of show gardens is just a little bit peculiar.

"They are such a different beast to the normal gardens I am so used to," says the boisterous 44-year-old Australian who lives in Sydney.

"The plants aren't really growing - they're just sitting there. But you gotta make it look like a real garden, so it's quite an art form," he explains with a laugh.

Ironically, he has a natural flair for it, because he won big at the Australian Garden Show last year despite it being his first-ever attempt designing a show garden. He took home a Gold Medal, and awards for Best in Show as well as the People's Choice.

But he isn't taking his success for granted, as he admits he still has a lot of work to do to prepare for the upcoming Singapore Garden Festival in August this year.

"It's my first time doing a garden here, so it's quite daunting to get around and see what Singaporeans are exposed to every day. And I've noticed there's a really high level of design here!" he says.

"In Australia you wouldn't find this level of planting and attention to detail in the streets. Here all the amazing plants I see in the nurseries are everywhere in public spaces. So you're a hard audience to design for, because you've seen it all."

So far, the concept for his festival show garden is still a work-in-progress, he reveals. But at the very least, Mr Moar intends to maintain his personal style - a balance between plants and architecture, and a contrast of simple elements against complicated ones.

At the same time, he is also keeping one clear vision in mind - the design must be catered to the local audience.

That's because to him, the most important thing about garden design is that audiences have to be able to connect with it. He explains: "When you're designing a garden in Singapore, it has to look like it belongs. As opposed to recreating a part of France in the middle of Singapore - that will just look a bit like Disneyland."

To make people actually like his garden after connecting with the design is an entirely separate issue altogether. That's something which can't always be described with mere words, he says.

"Everything I say on this topic often sounds esoteric and lofty, but that's because I'm so driven by the mood in a garden. I could describe what my garden is made of, but what I'm aiming to do is to create a feeling and an emotional response. Just like a work of art, it's all about a person's response," he adds.

According to Mr Moar, his gardening career began at the age of 17, all because of an intense dislike for studying. He would while away his time in the afternoons doing anything else that he could find, but after running out of "terrible daytime TV" to watch, he found the next best thing was to rummage around in his family's garden.

A little like a fairy tale, he fondly recalls: "It was somewhere amongst the azaleas that I got hooked, even though I didn't really know what I was doing."

Mr Moar eventually went on to study landscape architecture in university, and later he worked as a TV host for various Australian design-related programmes like Dry Spell Gardening, The Renovators and Moar Gardening.

When asked where he gets inspiration for his designs, Mr Moar explains that most of them simply come to him in the course of everyday life.

Pointing at a few horizontal black scratches on a white wall in front of him, he says: "Say I had a design problem that I haven't been able to work out, so I shelved it in my subconscious. Seeing those scratches might be as likely to trigger something as seeing one of the world's greatest buildings."

Although taking part in the Australian Garden Festival started out as a favour to a friend (the organiser), Mr Moar admits he is finally starting to enjoy doing show gardens, because their temporal nature gives him a chance to have a little fun.

"It's a chance to make a little piece of magic. All this work goes into it, the garden gets created, and then it disappears. It's a moment of fleeting beauty which happens so often in nature. Flowers are ephemeral - they're here, you see them, they make you feel a certain way, and then you go on. And that's how I feel about these show-gardens now," he says.

This article was published on April 12 in The Business Times.

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