If you haven’t watched The Big Flower Fight yet, you need to watch The Big Flower Fight.
Wholesome, entertaining, and deeply impressive, the Netflix series has captured the hearts and minds of those among us who enjoy watching talented people make extraordinary things – all the while hoping that they don’t collapse.
The series was fun, it was informative, and it had a focus on sustainability, immediately making it infinitely more worthy of a watch than most other creative competitions out there.
It also featured a couple of Irish contestants: landscape architects Declan and Eoghan.
Her caught up with them recently to chat all about their experience on the show, the pressure involved in creating massive flower-filled sculptures and, of course, their controversial elimination.
(*Spoilers for season one of The Big Flower Fight).
Declan and Eoghan
This is the first year The Big Flower Fight has been on our screens. Did you have any expectations going into the competition?
Eoghan: We have a lot of experience in landscaping, but TV is totally different. You’ve got loads of people in the background building things for other people and building things for you.
That can be really good, but then we thought we might have had an advantage building our own stuff, but we lost. But it was a great experience anyway.
What was day-to-day filming like, did you feel like the pressure was on?
Eoghan: On the first challenge we were stressed out. On that first day, we were waiting to get stuff done to our butterfly’s wings and it was holding us back, and we felt like we were way behind. But then we ended up finishing with a few hours left over.
Declan: You do have to blank out everybody else and what they’re doing, but there is great camaraderie to it. You do get to take breaks and you’ll sit down and have chats with each other. It’s not a case of ‘Don’t be looking at my stuff.’
Eoghan: The thing is, you’re all on top of each other, but you’re so focused on what you’re doing and your own work, that you don’t even notice anybody else progressing.
What was the audition process like?
Eoghan: I was just delighted to get a phone call as soon as I sent in the application. We were flown over to the audition, and there were some amazing people there. You had to make something in an hour and 45 minutes on camera, being interviewed, and with a set amount of materials.
Declan: I thought we worked well at the audition, I was impressed with how we carried ourselves and how we used our time. After that and when I thought we had a chance of getting in, I got more excited.
We didn’t know what we were getting into though. We went straight from work to the airport to the set. You see all these mad characters and loads of people around, and we knew it was going to be a big production then. We’d come back to Dublin in between for work and then we’d fly back out every week. It was a little bit nerve wracking.
Eoghan: It’s amazing how easy you get used to that environment though, and the dopamine hit to your brain from all of the interviews. It was a great experience.
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We need to ask you about your elimination in the Magnificent Mobiles challenge. Do you think you deserved to go home that week?
Eoghan: That was a shocking decision. And the judges admitted that they really liked it afterwards! We took the essence of floristry, which is a bunch of flowers, and we multiplied it to create this beautiful thing – an abstract mobile.
Declan: Off camera, Vic Reeves was even saying that [the mobile] was amazing, that it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. They had asked us to get out of our comfort zone and be more bold, so we said right, we’ll give you something completely different.
Eoghan: But look, it’s TV, if they wanted us gone that week they had us gone. If we had have progressed though, we would have hammered the shit out of them the following week.
Ryan and Andrew and Yan and Henke were fan favourites from the beginning. Were you glad that both teams ended up in the final?
Declan: Yan and Henke and Ryan and Andrew, both teams were amazing. They won so many Best in Blooms, no one else got a look in!
They’re fabulous artists, but they also have that eye for detail where they’ll throw it together at the start and then make it look absolutely amazing at the end.
If you were to enter the competition again, is there anything you’d do differently?
Eoghan: If we were doing it again, I wouldn’t bother trying to make anything that was going to last. There’s no point trying to cut corners building frames. I would avail of a lot more of the help from the welders and the carpenters on site and not try make my own stuff.
Declan: We could have concentrated more on the finer details. You’d sprinkle some glitter on something and it would bring it to life – and it looks good on camera too. Not that we ran out of time or anything, but we could have put more detail in, and brought ourselves into the top tier.
The Big Flower Fight is streaming on Netflix now.
You can follow Declan and Eoghan on Instagram here or check out their website here.
