Bagenalstown garden awarded certificate of distinction at Bloom

“WE can do better than that,” thought Eamonn Dermody, when he saw the 14 postcard gardens exhibiting at Bloom 2025.

Eamonn is a ‘passionate gardener’ and an active member of Bagenalstown community garden (BCG), which meets every Saturday from 1-3pm at the back of the parochial house on Railway Road.

He led the members to create a biodiverse garden for Bloom 2026 that focused around the last wolf on Mount Leinster. His colleague John Murphy designed the planting scheme and made a beautiful poster of Mount Leinster and the nine stones to sit as a backdrop behind the native garden.

And better than that they certainly did, with A Landscape of Transition by Bagenalstown community garden receiving a certificate of distinction from the Bloom judges over the weekend.

Their postcard garden, at just six metres square and created in only two months, presents a layered story of Carlow, touching on historical practices, present-day culture and future biodiversity of the county.

An essential component is the mini replica of the sculpture by Wicklow-based artist Emma Jane Rushworth, which commemorates the last wild wolf ‒ an Mac Tíre Deireanach. The wolf was hunted down by John Watson's hunt of wolfhounds and shot and killed on the Blackstairs mountain range in 1798, explained Tommy Cox, another member of the BCG that made its dream postcard garden a reality. They also incorporated the many mythological and traditional stories associated with the nine stones, too.

A slab of Carlow granite on two V posts barricaded the garden, referencing the traditional Carlow fence of old.

“Carlow granite is extremely hard,” Tommy explained. Pointing at the grooves on the slab of granite, he said: “What happened was the workers in the quarry would have made a little notch, drilled a hole or chiseled a hole and then they would have got dry timber pins and buried them into it. And then they would have flooded the granite. And the timber absorbed the moisture.

“The dry timber expanded and caused the granite to crack in pillars like this. That's how they cut it.” It worked so well that some people thought it was fairies at work. “People in the past wouldn't work in quarries because when they left it in the evening with the timber pins in, they'd come back the following morning and the granite would be splitting two. And they'd say that the fairies or the spirits were working in the quarry.” The pieces of the Carlow fence were donated by Liam O'Neill of O'Neill Brothers Engineering, Ballymoon, Bagenalstown for Bloom. Solar signs donned the background image and Carlow Community Development Partnership offered funding for the scaled-down wolf sculpture.

As for the planting: “All the trees here are from a native nursery, Cullen’s Nurseries in Hacketstown, Co Carlow. They were really, really good to us. So, all of those trees, our oak trees, our hawthorns are all native,” Tommy said. “Likewise, with the planting, it's all indigenous and native planting.

“We tried not to have a negative impact on our footprint by going into a bog, for example, and digging up rushes and so we purchased the heathers from Tierlán and the ferns. But then most of the other pieces came from people's gardens.

“So, we've had many different members of our community feeding into it,” said Tommy.

One of those community members is local priest Fr Declan Foley who “has been a colossal force for us in Bagenalstown because he's enabled us to create our community garden there; we're on diocese grounds. He's enabled us to go from two little polytunnels to a massive plant polytunnel. And we've had such success over the last three or four years there with community education,” said Tommy.

He said they have 110 members in the WhatsApp group for the garden, which is supported by KCETB. He works as a home school community liaison with Queen of the Universe NS, connecting adults in the school communities.

“If you could only bottle the responses that we've had here over the weekend and the pride that Carlow people particularly are having and I suppose the knowledge has been shared here.” “We often say that Bagenalstown should be the Westport of Leinster because we have the beautiful River Barrow, the canal, we have the Blackstairs mountains, we have the railway station, we've one of the best community gardens in the country.” Tommy wants Carlow people to “utilise what we have ‒ our wonderful people, our wonderful community, our wonderful town, lovely nature, our wonderful county and our wonderful flora and fauna.”