Standalone Clare Garden Festival announced

CLARE Garden Festival 2013 will be held on Sunday, April 28 as a standalone festival, in partnership with County Clare Show. The slogan will be ‘Going back to your roots’ and sponsors, partners and traders are now being sought.

Following the very successful first Clare Garden Festival, which ran aligned to County Clare Agricultural Show last July, the organisers have decided that for 2013, a standalone festival will be held at an earlier time in the year to suit gardeners and the gardening trade.

The theme ‘Going back to your roots’ allows for a wide focus of the festival beyond the topics of everyday gardening, with the aim to attract a large audience of national and international visitors.

“The Clare Garden Festival slogan for 2013 ‘Going back to your roots’ allows for a wide range of topics which, while of course covering root crops, will go beyond this and also cover heritage roots including ornamental bulbs and even allows for talks on heritage and famine topics,” said festival creator and organiser Carmen Cronin.

“Based on our successful work with celebrity gardening speakers in 2012, new and repeat experts will be invited to speak at next year’s festival. The place to get the news on the festival and many other gardening news first is our facebook page, which we invite people to join,” she said.

The venue will again be Ennis Showgrounds and organisers are going to make use of the great indoor facilities to shelter from the weather, while also using some of the outdoor areas available and giving a separate space to the popular celebrity talks.

“We believe it’s a great opportunity for ourselves and for Clare as a whole to embrace gardening, which shows a very promising trend with thousands of visitors at gardening festivals all over Ireland,” said Bernard Hanrahan, chairman of County Clare Agricultural Show Society.

“We hope to be hosting this festival annually at our premises. I look forward to getting started on the preparations with a working group we have recently established, led by the event organiser Carmen Cronin.”

In addition to talks by celebrity speakers, the 2013 festival will also feature a large garden and food fair to incorporate stalls by traders from the gardening industry and supported by artisan food and related stalls from Clare and beyond. A community project is envisioned to run alongside the event and the festival aims to bring gardening, sustainability and heritage associations together and make them accessible to visitors in one space.

“It is a huge honour to be organising this festival for gardening enthusiasts like myself in 2013 again. I look forward to working with the Clare Show committee and many other organisations to build on Clare Garden Festival’s success,” Ms Cronin added.

Full details, including a schedule for the day, speakers, sponsors and traders will be announced in the coming months and made available on the Clare Garden Festival facebook page and website www.claregardenfestival.com. Sponsors and traders can contact Carmen on cc@carmencronin.ie or 087 6117538.