Born: March 9th,1964
Died: July 1st, 2022
Dermot O’Neill, the Irish gardening expert and presenter of gardening programmes on RTÉ has died at the age of 58.
One of Ireland’s best-known gardening personalities, O’Neill made his first appearance on television in 1982 on RTÉ children’s programmes. He went on to present gardening segments on the station’s afternoon shows, Open House and Live at 3 and was a regular contributor on the Pat Kenny and Derek Mooney’s radio shows.
In the 1990s, he presented the Garden Show with Finola Reid and Helen Dillon and in 2008, he was the first presenter and mentor of Super Garden, the television gardening series in which amateur gardeners compete to showcase their garden at the Bloom festival. He also took part in the popular travel show, Times On Their Hands and displayed his excellent cooking skills when he became one of the few celebrity guests to achieve a five-star rating on RTÉ’s hugely cooking popular show, The Restaurant.
O’Neill wrote several gardening books including Roses Revealed (2007), Discover Gardening (2004), Dermot Gardens (2003) and Creative Gardening with Dermot O’Neill (1990). A long-time contributor to the RTÉ Guide and sometime editor of gardening magazines, O’Neill also wrote gardening columns for the Sunday Times and the Sunday Independent.
In 2001, he bought Clondeglass, a dilapidated Victorian walled garden in the foothills of the Slieve Bloom mountains at Clonadacasy, near Mountrath, Co Laois which he went on to restore over a number of years. He chronicled the intricacies of this restoration work — the building of new paths, the re-establishment of herbaceous borders, rose bushes, fruit trees and a vegetable garden and the introduction of hens, geese and bee hives — in the TV series, Dermot’s Secret Garden. He also published the coffee table-style book, Clondeglass: Creating a Gardening Paradise (Kyle Books) in which he described in detail this passion project.
Sadly in 2009, during the restoration work on Clondeglass, O’Neill was diagnosed with stomach cancer and although his health deteriorated during the filming of the series, his cancer went into remission in 2011. At that time, he spoke about the difficulties of his illness but also how restoring the walled garden helped him cope. He sold the garden a number of years later.
O’Neill was the eldest of Peter and Maura O’Neill’s three children. He grew up in Blackrock, Co Dublin and attended Christian Brothers College, Monkstown. His sisters, Carol and Louise, said he had a very happy childhood, filled with weekend adventures all over Ireland and annual holidays across Europe. “Dermot was always interested in nature and would bring home frog spawn from a Sunday drive and build ant farms in the garden,” they said.
O’Neill credited his grandmother as being the person who got him into gardening as a young child. He delivered his first gardening talk at the age of 16 when he addressed the Mother’s Union about flower arranging.
Following his secondary school education, he went to work for Barney Johnston who ran the Marlfield Garden Centre in Cabinteely, Co Dublin. Johnston, who was the first presenter of gardening programmes on RTÉ, was a positive influence on O’Neill and his work at Marlfield would go on to shape his future career. He also worked in the horticultural college at University College Dublin as a young man.
In the 1990s, O’Neill began taking groups on gardening tours across Europe, South Africa and China. He also gave gardening lectures in Ireland, the UK and the United States.
Rachel Doyle, horticulturist and owner of the Arboretum in Leighlinbridge, Co Carlow and at Kilquade, Co Wicklow was one of O’Neill’s long-time friends who accompanied him on many of his gardening tours. “I remember several visits to Monet’s garden in France, going down the Yangtze river in China with him, and his phenomenal knowledge of plants on Madeira. He was always looking out for the rare and exotic plant,” said Doyle.
In 2007, O’Neill launched Garden Show Ireland at the walled garden at Hillsborough Castle in Co Down. A year later, he appeared on American TV on the St Patrick’s Day episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show and spoke later about how his fame spread throughout the United States following this appearance.
Renowned for his infectious enthusiasm about the plant world, he said in an Irish Times interview in 2013, “the great thing about gardening is that you never know it all. There is always something new to learn”. His friends say he loved life and lived it to the full. “He was a bon viveur, a connoisseur of good wines and great fun to be with,” said one friend. “He was a warm, kind, caring, considerate person with a great sense of style,” said another.
O’Neill also had a great interest in antiques, art, architecture, gemstones, photography and classical music. He was a member of the Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland for a time, a founding committee member of the Irish Garden Plant Society and a patron of the homeless charity, Threshold Ireland.
In 2014, Irish rose breeder David Kenny bred a new rose and named it after O’Neill. And in 2016, Mount Congreve House Gardens in Co Waterford announced that a new variety of the Magnolia plant — one of O’Neill’s favourite flowers — would be named Magnolia campbellii Dermot O’Neill in his honour.
Dermot O’Neill is survived by his sisters, Carol and Louise, nieces, nephews, grandnephew, uncles, aunts and cousins. He was predeceased by his father, Peter O’Neill and mother, Maura O’Neill (née Hall).