Bloom 2019 festival highlights
Phoenix Park was all in bloom over the June bank holiday weekend as the Bloom 2019 festival saw over a 100,000 gardening enthusiasts visit its exhibits. Mental Health and Well-Being featured prominently in some of the gardens designed, including the large ‘Grounded – Growing Conversations around Mental Illness’ garden and the smaller ‘Lidl Healthy Mind Healthy Planet Garden’.
The People’s Choice Award of the festival went to the ‘Memories are Made of This – Dementia: Understand Together‘ garden. Designed by Robert Moore, the garden is a celebration of the 1950s where people living with dementia can reminisce and share stories from their early years. In designing this award-winning garden, Moore collaborated with men and women attending the Alzheimer Society of Ireland Social Club in Bloomfield Health Services, who shared their heart-warming memories of those times, enabling the designer to bring them back to life in the garden today.
The Bloomfield Social Club is a weekly social gathering run by the ASI in Bloomfield’s Day Centre for people with dementia, their friends, families or carers. Individuals can drop in to chat, access information and support, participate in activities, and meet others to exchange ideas and experiences.
Bloomfield recently began creating its own sensory garden in the Wicklow Way courtyard (photo), with the on-going assistance of volunteers from the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA).