Overview of our Gardeners and their Focus at Clare Garden Festival

Jim Cronin - FESTIVAL Focus: Organic Gardening

Jim Cronin has been gardening in Co Clare from his early childhood and is now known to many as a leading national expert in organic horticulture. He is a mine of information and advice on all aspects of growing organically, with a lifetime of experience and a deep love of working in cooperation with nature. Jim is also an advocate of local, sustainable agriculture and was a founding member of the thriving Killaloe Farmers Market. He is running successful courses from his farm both for beginners and comprehensive 9-month educational programmes.

Kitty Scully - FESTIVAL Focus: Food from the Garden

 Best known for her RTE 1 series’ How to Create a Garden’, Kitty has also written a weekly vegetable gardening and foraging column for the Irish Examiner for a number of years. In 2009, gaelic speaking Kitty contributed to TG4’s gardening programme, An Garraí Glas and in 2010 she visited community gardens around Ireland, co presenting RTÉ’s Corrigan Cooks Naturally. Kitty is now the Head Kitchen Gardener at Airfield Estate in Dublin. Here she manages a fabulous newly designed productive yet pretty space which supplies an on- site restaurant and is the perfect platform for Kitty to deliver gardening workshops and share her passion and commitment to the production and consumption of local, seasonal home grown food.

Carl Wright - FESTIVAL Focus: Ornamentals

Carl Wright is the creator & owner of Caher Bridge Garden in The Burren, Co Clare. This award winning garden was begun in 1999 and has been developed in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable. With a background in Ecology Carl has designed his garden to fit as sympathetically as possible into it's surrounding landscape, both on an ecological and visual level. An avid plant collector, the garden is now home to several notable plant collections, which include Ferns, primulas, hostas. mahonia, galanthus, geum, bergenia, & hydrangea. The garden has featured in many publications, magazines & books.

Carl is a regular speaker throughout Ireland & the UK on various wildlife and horticultural subjects, and is also a regular contributor to various horticultural publications.

Michael Kelly - FESTIVAL Focus: Grow your own

Mick is founder of GIY, a social entrepreneur, author, TV presenter and hacker grower.  He worked in the IT industry for 10 years before starting GIY in 2008 after a chance encounter with a bulb of Chinese garlic in a supermarket.  He co-presented/produced 3 series of Grow Cook Eat for RTE which is now watched around the world on Amazon Prime.   He also presents and co-produced the 6-part series Food Matters on RTE 1.

Mick is an Ashoka Fellow, a member of The Irish Food Writers Guild and a board member at Common Knowledge.  He has written 5 books, the latest of which The GIY Diaries was nominated for an Irish Book Award in 2022.  He has written columns on food for The Irish Times, The Irish Independent and Food & Wine Magazine.  He was Local Food Hero in the Food & Wine Awards.  He lives in Dunmore East with his wife Eilish and two teenage GIYers.

Peter Czech - FESTIVAL Focus: Ornamentals and Fruit - Benefactor of our 2024 Programme for Specialist Nurseries

Owner and Grower at Newports Green Hands. Specialising in Espalier Fruit and flowering plants.

Jo Newton - FESTIVAL Focus: Talks Host & Organic Gardening

For over 25 years Jo has lived in Co. Clare, off the mains grid, on a little oasis of self- planted woodland and orchard, bogland and wild riverside, alongside productive organic gardens. This is all managed as sustainably as possible. For 20 of these years she worked with the Irish Seed Savers, co-ordinating the growing, harvesting, threshing and saving of seed of over 200 different crops of vegetable, grain and flowers each and every year. The best way of showing a self-sustaining lifestyle is to live it, leaving biodiversity, natural beauty and abundance for our descendants.  In 2022, Jo is exploring new gardening paths and opportunities.

Lynn O'Keeffe - FESTIVAL Focus: Horticulture & Food

Head Gardener at Portumna Castle Gardens. Previous to this she was an outreach horticulturist, community gardener, author, creator and carer of gardens, based in Kinvara, Co. Galway where she taught Horticulture to TY students in Seamount College, and manages Doorus Orchard Community Garden.