As they say up here in drumlin country, a good garden show should be able to ‘whistle and chaw meal’, meaning to multitask. It should provide an excellent day out for the family, it should showcase the best in garden design, plants and produce, and it should offer inspiration to gardeners, in terms of both landscape design and planting schemes.

Bloom 2009 scored on all counts. Indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces offered everything you’d ever think to buy for a garden, from the latest in greenhouse technology from Colm Warren, to the eye catching display of nest boxes and hen houses from Chic-Hens. There was live entertainment, cookery demonstrations, lectures and playgrounds for children - and I drove home with the car boot filled to busting point with delicacies from the Artisan Food Market. Top marks here went to Castlefarm’s fenugreekflavoured cheese and Taste of the Caribbean’s Tobago Tamarind chutney.

It is impossible to do justice to all of the 28 show gardens in this space. Suffice to say there was something to suit every pocket, from triple thevalue-of-your-house-style concepts to ingenious ways to make the most of a tiny back yard. Of the gardens on a grand scale, my own favourite was Frazer McDonogh’s Secluded Water Garden, a haven of lush planting where stepping stones tempted you over the pond to an island retreat complete with a hammock.

I was also much taken by two gardens that stood out as particularly relevant to these straightened times. The first was a spellbinding design entitled Translucency, by Liat and Oliver Schurmann of Mount Venus Nursery in south Dublin. As always, the Schurmanns’ inspiration was nature, pure and simple.

The only hard landscaping were natural granite boulders, a path led through a sea of contrasting grasses and dainty perennials, and the walls of fogged glass added a contemporary touch that created a diffused screen, allowing for privacy in an urban setting. Translucency won Best Medium Garden and Mount Venus Nursery won Best in Show for its display.

The second was a pocket handkerchief gem, one of two gardens by Orla and Paul Woods of Kilmurry Nursery, the multi-award-winning nursery in Gorey, Co Wexford. The larger space, Keeling’s Naturally Fresh Garden, was a tongue in cheek homage to fruit, a riot of clashing primary colours - garden as pop art installation.

In dramatic contrast, Honest 2 Goodness showed how the tiniest plot can be hugely productive - and pretty into the bargain. Based on the concept of an allotment, it consisted of a series of herb and vegetable beds bounded by stout lengths of timber painted in delicate pastels.

The straight path leading to the lavender door in the back wall had poached egg plants as edging, and the entire plot was fenced in with duck-egg blue paling.

Most people would regard paling as too utilitarian for a garden, but give it a lick of a pretty colour and it has a charm all its own. Other gardens that caught the eye included Anthony Ryan’s multilevel design, Metamorphosis, with its sunken alcove, a contemporary take on the sheltering cave; and Tim Austin’s dreamy concept, The Garden Lounge (judged Best in Show), with its steel-edged pool, eco-friendly deck, colourful paving, cutting edge loungers and a hammock under a canopy of multi stemmed River birch (Betula Nigra).

Dominick Cullinane’s Aubergine celebrated that particular slice of the colour spectrum with an oversize urn flanked by a series of waterfalls and a superb planting scheme dominated by the large purple bells of Campanula latifolia. Avant garden was represented by Fiann O’Nualláin’s land art installation for Unicef, a miniature drumlin speckled with wildflowers; and Hugh Ryan’s Sequoia, an uncompromising combination of bare scarlet tree trunks rising from a near-black landscape. Not, I would think, most people’s idea of a garden, but an eye-catching solution for a small awkward space.

This year’s theme, Grow Your Own, was emphasised by a magnificent reconstruction of US First Lady Michelle Obama’s vegetable plot, a display that looked fit to feed the entire District of Columbia, let alone the White House. Sophie von Maltzan’s Recession-Prosperity Garden demonstrated how to turn a suburban plot into a vegetable larder, and there was a host of ideas calculated to get kids switched on to veggie-growing as a fun habit for life. This is a topic that demands a column of its own, and I’ll return to it next week.

In the current climate, garden centres and nurseries are among the very few businesses doing record business. The floral marquee was packed with gardeners of all ages - from a 60-something spellbound by Mr Middleton’s Gold Medalwinning vegetable display, to a ten-year-old girl who made sketches and took copious notes (including the full Latin names) of the plants that caught her fancy - clearly a Liat Schurmann in the making.

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