You would have thought that when he moved to a new house in Wicklow, known as the Garden of Ireland, Diarmuid Gavin, the enfant terrible of the gardening fraternity, would have wasted no time hauling in the diggers, landscaping materials, amazing plants and architectural altars.

Think again. The TV gardening maverick admits that it’s easy to talk about garden design, to lecture on it and write books about it, but he developed a fear of it when it came to his own plot.

“I bought a new home, a show house, with a perfectly simple garden – wooden fences, sloped lawn, some scalloped shaped beds to the sides, and that was it. But for the life of me, I couldn’t decide on a good design which would satisfy the family,” he says.

“The difficulty in the last few years has been the freezing or just plain cold winters. I like to battle against the elements and the echiums that are growing up against the sitting room window are testament to that - they have been burnt by frost but even now stand at a majestic 10ft high. If you are a gardener you roll with the weather.”

He offers the following design tips to gardeners who want their garden to look good, whatever the weather: l Keep the overall design simple. When you’re making a plan, use a few sweeping lines to lead the eye from the viewing point, which is often the kitchen window, right down to the back of your plot.

  • Turn your lawn into a welcoming green wide pathway, which almost acts as an arrow, drawing the eye or the visitor on a journey.
  • Keep the planting simple. Mass plant low-growing shrubs such as dwarf purple berberis for colour or clouds of Pittosporum tobira ‘Nanum’.
  • If your garden is extremely small, shaded or just damp, give up on a lawn altogether. It’s not going to repay any maintenance and you will spend years and fortunes bemoaning the brown patches and invasion of weeds and moss. Dig it up and replace it with a top-quality artificial turf. This can be wonderful, a green carpet which always looks good, can be easily cleaned, allows rainwater and snow to drain away and doesn’t need cutting or feeding. For a top-of-the-range brand, try Easigrass.
  • Consider what your specimens will look like all year round, not only when covered in foliage or flower. If you’re planting a tree, why not try a multi-stemmed birch? When bare from October to April it still has a lovely sculptural shape. Enhance this through the evening by uplighting through the use of a spotlight at its base.