About Emily Fogarty Design

There’s never been a time in my life when I haven’t loved being in nature: the sense of refuge, of connection to the earth has always been, for me, deeply restorative. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to deepen this love into practical skills and knowledge: from studying Garden Design after school to exploring the work of women garden designers during my undergraduate degree; from volunteering on organic farms across France to working in one of Dublin’s favourite garden centres. But it was when I took up my apprenticeship in garden care and design that I saw that the early connection I had with nature was the beginning of something I could build a whole life upon.

Under my mentor—a Botanical Garden-trained horticulturalist with a three-decade career in maintenance—I tended to and worked on some of Dublin’s most distinguished private gardens. Many of these were first put together more than twenty years ago, and all by the same designer. Becoming intimate with these spaces, returning to them again and again through the course of five years, I saw what good garden design means: deep foresight, guided by knowledge, experience, and respect. During the design and installation process, a garden’s full lifetime has to be held in mind every step of the way, as guide and as goal. Because a garden is not some ‘thing’ that is, like a building, simply installed once and for all—it is a whole living environment that is grown into over time and with the world. The good garden sways gently on the line between accommodating nature and taming its wildness: too relaxed a design and you end up with overgrown chaos, too much control and you find a garden with no sense of life, of presence. The eye for design and the plant knowledge I cultivated during my apprenticeship allowed me to to find that delicate balance, to compose spaces that are as practical as they are beautiful, held steady by strong evergreen structure, with seasonal plants that come and go through the course of the year, giving gardens that remain full and inviting no matter the month.

There’s so much I look forward to exploring. I’m excited to bring new clients’ visions to life, to work alongside all sorts of different tradespeople. And I’m always looking for new ways to deepen and expand my own knowledge and craft—right now, for example, I’m working out a style that incorporates elements of a site’s local habitat, geared towards biodiversity and native plants. I have years of experience behind me, but in many ways I’m still in the early days of this journey, and delighted to be here.