The Interwoven Garden
By Éamonn Ó Hairtnéada
This September, our new garden will open: The Interwoven Garden – a place where nature, craft, and art come together.
The Interwoven Garden was designed by artist, hedgelayer, tilemaker, weaver and former participant of De Ateliers Éamonn Ó Hairtnéada, drawing inspiration from both Dutch and Irish traditions, and from the rural queer life in Devon (UK). The garden celebrates traditional skills like weaving, tilemaking, and hedgelaying, all while telling a story of connection between city and countryside. This narrative between the urban and the rural frames and enclosed this inner city garden.
About The Interwoven Garden
The initial colour design for the garden is invoked by the presence of the two native jays; a keystone species in rewilding, these inquisitive urban corvids are the actual masters of oak reforestation, obsessive in sowing acorns. Throughout the garden, you’ll see handmade glazed bricks and tiles, all carefully placed to reflect patterns from the ancient Celtic Lindisfarne Gospels, as well as influences from Iranian paradise gardens Ó Hairtnéada visited. This led to an exploration of how city gardens are enclosed. It turns out the word ‘Tuun’ - the Dutch word for willow boundary, relates to the word for a single strand of willow; wilgen ‘teen’ - willow ‘toe’ and also Dutch word for garden; ‘Tuin’. To ‘tuun’ in Dutch is therefore to weave a garden boundary.
Ó Hairtnéada uses the woven protective page borders from the celtic illuminated manuscript as a map; weaving Woonhuis's enclosed garden through glazed bricks and handmade tiles; through references of his own heritage; both Dutch and Irish, and as a queer rural landworker meeting the wild hares, hawks and badgers on the farm.
After months of work behind the scenes, the garden will open to the public in September 2025. Everyone is welcome to explore this peaceful place where city and nature meet.
About Éamonn Ó Hairtnéada
Éamonn is an artist, farmer and basket-weaver in Devonshire, England who’s an expert at working with wood and all things that grow. To him the confrontation with specific spaces for long periods of time is where relationships of kin are build and personified through material means; building identities through material representations that are sometimes either useful or problematic when thinking about natural sustainable equilibrium.
