The Bloom in the Park festival at the Phoenix Park was a delight for gardeners and non-gardeners alike, writes Ros Drinkwater.

Quite apart from providing the family with an entertaining day out, garden shows should be manna for hungry gardeners, inspiring, informing and sending us home laden with carrier bags stuffed with produce and plants.

For the second year in succession, Bord Bia’s Bloom in the Park scored on all points. Credit must go to the Garden Advisory Group, the panel of experts whose task it was to choose the show gardens from the hundreds of applications.

This year the mix was just right, with 30 gardens in a wide range of styles to suit every taste and every location.

Classic Italian formality took the ‘Best in Show’ honour, awarded to Paul Doyle for ‘Wherever the wind takes me I travel’, a garden conceived as a mulberry grove subdivided into linear strips on different levels, and ornamented with a dry river bed of succulents and vertical bronze statues.

However, my own favourites were two that demonstrated both ends of the style spectrum: 21st century chic outdoor room and magical forest glade.

The first was Paul Martin’s Gold medal-winning Pfizer Health and Wellness Garden, one designed for a cook who grows her own produce and loves to relax in the company of friends. In another life, Martin might have been an architect. He’s a wizard at manipulating space and, in this case, the design masterstroke was the way he used that very popular garden feature, the canal.

In the best gardens, concealment is always a key element - and Martin achieved it by framing his waterway with two contemporary walls, their ovate apertures echoed in the boundary wall, where a contemporary sculpture took centre-stage. Timber walkways bridged the canal, tall grasses softened the hard landscaping, and mulberry trees and vines provided a canopy.

What was concealed was the sunken dining area, which came complete with its own kitchen. There were fresh herbs on hand growing in pots on the wall and the dining table top was cleverly level with the canal.

Generous raised beds surrounding this area were planted with vegetables, salad leaves, more herbs and aromatic plants - what’s nicer than to sip a glass of something chilled by the water’s edge, while you finger the scented leaves of lemon verbena?

The other garden that took my fancy was Sheena Vernon’s design, ‘The Kellogg’s Coco Pops Awaken the Magic’, also a Gold medal winner. Vernon set out to explore Irish fairy folklore and had the brainwave of making the garden interactive - visitors could wander through the glade to examine the myriad of fairy features (the fruits of the good fairy, and the untidy den of the bad fairy) at close quarters.

The Phoenix Park itself provided the centre point, in the shape of a magnificent mature yew tree, and a nice touch were the bales of hay which allowed you to relax in comfort while you gazed up through its branches.

Woodland was a popular theme this year. Liat and Oliver Schurmann created a leafy haven that would provide the perfect antidote to an urban lifestyle in the courtyard of a modern apartment building.

David Everard and Jule May Schedwill contributed Mystical Woodland Retreat, an enchanting concept apparently free from artifice and crammed with detail; moss-covered rocks, little pools, a thyme lawn and native Irish plants thriving in the dappled shade, and sprouting from stone walls.

My favourite small garden in the show also had a sylvan theme. This was Frazer McDonogh’s Lyons Tea Garden ‘Green Retreat’. A spell working in Hawaii has given the Wicklow-based designer a taste for subtropical planting, and he made great use of dramatic, lush foliage, feathery Dicksonia tree ferns, fan-shaped Trachycarpus Fortunei, ground ferns and hostas.

A miniature water fall spilled into a pond planted with iris and reeds, the tiny tea table was suitably elegant, and the garden was encircled with fencing of natural willow.

A number of gardens demonstrated the visual impact of a bridge used as a garden focal point. Prettiest of all was in Tim Austin’s Inspiration from Mount Usher, with its picturesque gazebo and a tiny curved bridge inspired by the ‘bouncy bridge’ over the river Vartry.

Planting was a combination of herbaceous and water plants, and Austin showed the ideal way to display alliums, by using them to punctuate a bed mass planted with lavender.

As for the stuffed-carrier bag element, while my assistant seemed intent on hoovering up the Floral Marquee, I carried home two fat hen stone finials - which will take up residence on my gate posts.