So here’s the low down on Bord Bia Bloom, Ireland’s largest garden festival. As I’ve mentioned, it IS NOT Chelsea. For a start tickets are priced at €30, a price that even the most brassic of gardeners can scrape together. If you know Ireland at all you’ll know how Father Ted was more an actual documentary than a sitcom for the time it was set in. The episode when Ted goes to Funland, is still a fairly regular occurrence in most small rural villages during summer. If you imagine that, but with some corporate level sponsorship and more refined taste creeping in from a couple of generations who’ve had access to EU jobs and money, you’re about there with the aesthetic of modern large festivals in Ireland.

Ireland is refreshing for its complete lack of pretension and mostly equitable availability to every profession/interest. There are little or no baked in, invisible rules held only by “those in the know” on how to do things. It doesn’t matter a toss over here who you know (unless you need planning permission for something) the fact of the matter is Ireland is so small the chances are you’ve given at least one person in the crowd at a festival this size a hand-job or a fingering at some point in each other’s history. Everyone can have a go… and they do.

One of the first things people note who visit Ireland are the extreme brightness of colours. Not so much these days where everyone is getting sophisticated and boring and painting houses “Ravensbreath”, but up until recently it wasn’t unusual to drive through a village comprised of fuschia pink houses, nudged up alongside sky blue pubs with green windows and doors, or houses painted in the local town or county hurling team colours. Garden and town planting too was and still mostly is, garish, clashing, big, blousy.. all de rigour at the moment among the English boulevardier, who call it “Cottage-core”. I have a theory why this phenomena is a thing in Ireland, once you live here for a while the romantic imagery of misty mountains, solitary curlews and soft mild moss-fodder weather is a living purgatory! To stay sane for a minimum of eight months of the year you have to paint your house neon yellow! Catholic iconography rivals anything Mexico can produce! The COLOUR!! This carries through to Irish gardens, with zero apology, nor should there be!

The smallness of Ireland also reflects why Bloom, as a garden festival has had to diversify to cover food. There just aren’t enough people in Ireland into their gardens enough to dedicate five days and a whole festival site to solely horticulture. It perhaps needs to keep a tight rein on how much bigger the food section of the festival gets and encourage and facilitate more horticultural businesses in, particularly the smaller independent businesses, of which there are plenty, from people making plant feeds, biochar and worm composts to independent growers. I don’t think the massive nurseries selling hedging and proudly displaying rows of cherry laurel cuttings shoved into some peat compost really need the advertising of Bloom to sell their SHIT.

The show gardens at Bloom represent a perfect microcosm of what is going on in Ireland and the nation’s fashion. Put short, there is none! Every garden was completely different in style, planting pallette, aesthetic and finess. Cornus kousa appeared a lot, more due to the fact it’s easy to get hold of at the minute I think, as are Geums and foxgloves. I particularly liked the semi-fucked Eucalyptus with die back at the top (genuinely so). The point is, some gardens were good, with great attention to detail, some gardens were a bit shit, however, it didn’t matter! The gardens built by people who left things ragged and weird were still allowed to happen, given the opportunity and people still loved them! And that is ok! A balcony garden made everything farcical by being entirely comprised of lego. Fair fucks! It was arguably the most sustainable garden there!

Anyway, Bloom is slightly weird, with some sublime moments, lots of food that you don’t have to queue for for hours, good toilet facilities (important), bits for everyone including botanical art show, a florists tent, balcony gardens, mini-gardens, large show gardens, the garden talk tent, the tent to buy tat in, trade stands, production gardening area, a nod to the agricultural/production growing side of things, complete with a cow and sheep enclosure, the cooking display area and a stage hosted by RTE lyric (the classical channel). There was also a roaming quartet of old fellas.

My highlight of the show, after obviously being hugely impressed by the wicker man construction in the Mount Venus show garden and their well grown display of potato varieties, was as I was passing the “Horticulture Is Life” stage just as a talk was starting.

“I’m going to talk to you today about Potaaaytos”.. yer man says..

Bloom. Ireland’s horticultural roots, unapologetically on show.