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Entertainment

19th May 2020

The Big Flower Fight: The wholesome landscaping content we deserve during lockdown

Jade Hayden

Incredibly wholesome content all round.

Looking for something new to watch? Of course you are. We’re in lockdown, there’s very little else to do, and the weather hasn’t exactly been stunning for the past couple of days.

The only thing keeping the majority of us going is the promise of new content in the form of TV shows, Zoom calls, and maybe the odd meme or two.

It’s distraction we crave and it’s distraction we’ve been getting – and lucky for us, Netflix have been fairly solid when it comes to new releases that are bound to do just that.

Their latest TV show offering, The Big Flower Fight, is probably one of the more wholesome releases that has come our way amid the pandemic.

The eight part series sees ten pairs of budding, passionate amateur gardeners create spectacular, large-scale flower installations for a chance to win the ultimate gardening prize: to design their own sculpture at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens.

The dream for the plant-based (no, the other one) among us.

Judged by florist Kristen Griffith-VanderYacht, and presented by Vic Reeves and Natasia Demetriou, the series brings the world of gardening to an entirely new audience.

It even features a pair of Irish landscapers competing for the coveted top prize – Declan and Eoghan, who met while studying in UCD eight years ago.

“​We were mature students – apparently! – so we hung out straight away,” says Eoghan.

“I studied carpentry and joinery in my teens, then I started getting into landscaping and planting. I got more and more into landscaping on a bigger scale so I decided to go off and study landscape architecture at college. ”

Eoghan and Declan 

Declan says that during the series, the pair had to make an edible throne, a feat they achieved by combining their love of architecture and Irish history.

“We used a historic link to a megalithic site called Newgrange in Ireland and that was one of my favourite challenges,” he says.

“You’re put into an environment where it’s all new to everyone. We all came together, and it was a bit ‘us and them’ with the judges.

“You’re all against the clock, you’re against the judges, so we just saw the funny side of all of that and cracked on with it.”

The Big Flower Fight is streaming on Netflix now. 

Topics:

netflix