Diarmuid Gavin interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2004
Diarmuid Gavin, ( voted the sexiest gardener on British television) is meeting me at the Waterford Crystal factory today.  I’ve never met Diarmuid and I’ve always fancied Monty Don, but I’m open minded.  Unfortunately, as I arrive, Sinead, the friendly publicist calls to say that Diarmuid has pulled a hamstring, and he might have to see a doctor.  How did he pull a hamstring?  I ask, intrigued.
‘  Dancing,’ she says.  ‘He’s been practicing dancing for a television show.’
Dancing?  I cast my mind back to the various gardening programmes that I’ve seen Diarmuid do and I cant recall any dancing.  But the dancing, it turns out, is for a celebrity ‘Come Dancing’ show, busy doing other things.  Diarmuid is in Waterford because he’s
 designed a Christmas tree, made from Waterford crystal, but he can’t abandon the dancing, so he’s brought his partner and teacher with him.  The difference between celebrities and ordinary people is that celebrities have more energy than ordinary people.  Perhaps they don’t watch television.
Diarmuid is limping.  But he’s not moaning.  Instead, he’s running around fetching a mug and spoon so that I can have the decaffeinated organic coffee from my handbag.  This demand is met with approval, I am pleased to report.  I already know that Diarmuid is into the race against waste, because he does ads for it on television.  Not the best ads I’ve ever seen, but you can’t have everything.  What I hadn’t realised is that in his career as Ireland’s most famous gardener, Diarmuid has never ever used pesticides or other nasty chemicals. 
‘I am aggressively organic,’ he tells me.  ‘Always have been.  Which means that I refuse to kill anything at all, not even the slugs.’
This is something he has remained pretty quiet about.  ‘Not everyone can afford to do it the way I do it,’ he says, ‘So I’m not shouting about it.’
He recycles at home, but not out of choice.
‘I recyle because my wife tells me to, and she’s in charge!” he says.  This is a man who knows his place.  His wife Justine is the sister of Madeleine, a colleague of mine and the daughter of Terry Keane, Ireland’s most famous gossip columnist.  He asks me if I know Terry.  I say that I once gave her a Reiki treatment.  And I offer to try the Reiki on his hamstring. 
‘Does it work?’ he asks, earnestly.
‘Oh it definitely works,’ Sinead says.  I tell him I tried it on a lemon tree, which subsequently produced fifteen lemons. 
‘I may have to try it’, he says.
We are about to see the tree which Diarmuid has designed and which will be auctioned in aid of ‘Save the Children’ in London, on the seventh of December.
‘My mother collected Waterford,’ he says.  ‘I grew up with it in the parlour.  I was amazed to be getting this chance.  I was also worried, because people expect you to be able to design anything, so I had a fear of letting them down, which was really horrible.’
AS we make our way through the factory, past the wonderful spectacle of real life glass blowing, moulding, carving and generally creating, we pause for a moment beside some tubes of molten glass.  These tubes are what inspired the tree, Diarmuid explains.

Like a true gent, he offers to carry my laptop, even though he’s injured.  And every time we go through a door, he opens it for me.  I tell him that he was well brought up.
‘It was drilled into me,’ he says.
The Christmas tree is ‘bling bling’ he explains, by virtue of the fact that it is a Christmas tree made out of crystal.  How could it not be?
And the lights are turned out, and the tree is unveiled.  It is a magical object, like a tree made entirely from icicles, it sparkles and glows with a bluish light.  There is much approval, but Diarmuid is not  satisfied.  He wants to see what it will look like if a small number of crystal decorations are strategically placed on it.  Not too many, because that will be too ‘bling bling’, but not too few, either.  It has to be just exactly right.  Later he explains that he won’t do anything if he doesn’t absolutely love it, which means that he often has to turn down lucrative offers to design things.  And sometimes getting something exactly right means that it costs a lot of money to make.
‘You have no idea how much this tree cost,’ Sinead says.  ‘lets just say we went over budget!”
‘And it can take months for me to have an idea,’ he explains.  ‘I hate letting people down, but if nothing comes to me, nothing comes to me.’
In an executive office, filled with crystal things,- crystal pen holders, ash trays, chandeliers and door knobs, we sit down to talk.  Diarmuid is clearly in pain, but isn’t taking his pain killers because you are supposed to wait until you are having a meal.  I tell him that I would just take them, if I were him, and ignore the doctor’s advice, but he won’t.  He doesn’t like taking pills.
‘Being rung by Waterford Crystal is quite a big deal for me,’ he says.
‘Was it like being asked to design a car for Ferrari?’ I ask.
‘It was like being asked to dance and not being able to do it!  The executive must have his own loo….’
Diarmiud is momentarily distracted by the opulence of our surroundings.
‘It’s great isn’t it?  Anyway they fly me over and send a car…’
They even sent dancing girls to meet him at the airport.  It wasn’t always this way.  When he started out, nobody wanted to pay him to design gardens because he wasn’t interested in designing pretty suburban gardens like the one his mother had.  He was a rebel from Rathfarnam, who read the NME and dreamed of escaping.
‘ I rebelled into blowing up that suburban idea of a garden. Nobody at that time was interested in different gardens.  I started out thinking I was going to be this great entrepreneur, and that was a disaster.  So I had to make pretty gardens, and do it badly.’
What did work, however, was entering competitions because competitions want something outside the norm.  At one of them, at the RDS, Diarmuid won a gold medal and attracted the attention of his future mother in law, Terry Keane.  Who invited him to work on her garden in Ranelagh.  Because he was homeless and broke, she also let him move into the basement.  It was in the course of living in Terry’s house that he met his wife Justine.  A romance that was assisted by Terry’s mother, Justine’s granny.
‘She was ninety four and I loved her to bits,’ Diarmuid says.  ‘And she invited both me and Justine to dinner one night and just left us to it.  But it took a year for us to get together.’
At that time he was a pretty lousy catch, he says.
‘I was in a very, very bad way.  Living out of bin bags.  But I decided to enter an Irish themed garden in the Chelsea Flower Show, with Terry’s support and we got a bronze medal.’
Doing the Chelsea Flower Show lead eventually to a spot on ‘Gardener’s World’, with an anarchic light-up garden.  And suddenly there were thirty television programmes calling.  There followed seven years of doing gardening spots on television shows, at a time when it wasn’t considered sexy to be a gardener on television.  And then someone introduced him to the Byronesque Laurence Llewellyn Bowen and the rest is history.  Being a celebrity gardener on television nowadays is almost as good as being Nigella Lawson.  Nowadays Diarmuid is an outdoor gardening god. But he’s taking a break for a while.
‘We are expecting our first child on December the seventh,’ he says.  ‘The same day as the Waterford crystal auction.  And for all our sakes, I want to spend time at home.  So I’m easing up on the television for a while.’
He’s also re-locating, to Dublin.  After living in London for nearly ten years.  And he’s looking forward to it tremendously.
‘I can’t wait,’ he says.  ‘I love London and I especially admire Ken Livingstone and what he’s doing, but it’s no place to bring up kids.  God, we’ll have to bring the dogs too!’
When we next meet, Diarmuid is no longer limping.  He’s been booted out of the television dancing competition, but he doesn’t mind.  He gave it his best shot.  It is a fine, sunny day in Dublin and we are sipping coffee at a pavement café, just down the road from the Ranelagh house where he met Justine.  Diarmuid is on his way to a meeting, to get sponsored for next year’s Chelsea Flower Show.  This year, he says, he spent five hundred thousand pounds, which was a bit of a dent, financially.  He looks great in a suit and he’s got a cool briefcase, but he says he’s useless with money.  Useless.  The baby is still on schedule and so is the move to Dublin.  A house has already been found.
‘So I’ll just have to make money,’ he says.  ‘I don’t have a choice.’
We discuss ‘I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here’, which has just started showing again.  Maybe he can do that next year, I say, to make a few quid.
‘Not in a million years,’ he says.  ‘Even though Justine loves it.’
Now that I’ve met the sexiest gardener on television, I can see what they mean.  He may be a celebrity, but he’s got integrity.  He’s got soul.  And from what I can see, Justine is a lucky lady.