Jane Powers is inspired by a group of avid new gardeners in Ballymun, glad for their own patch of green.
We're standing in the back garden of Mary Delaney's house in Marewood, Ballymun, looking at the grass on a new lawn. As with many gardens in newly-built estates, there have been problems with poorly drained soil. "Did you spike the lawn?" I ask. "I aerated it!" says Mary, correcting my sloppy terminology.
Not only did she aerate it, she tells me, she also raked it and sowed seed in the bald patches. And before that she had dug large holes in it, and filled them with rubble and stones to act as sumps for the excess water to soak away. After such dedicated treatment, the grass is beginning to recover, its green blades gradually obscuring the brown skin of soil. Around the lawn's edge, the borders are ablaze with dahlias, petunias and poppies, while an expertly-trained passion flower vine advances along the panelled fencing.
It's less than a year since Mary and her family moved in, and the garden has got off to a very good start - which is what you would expect from such a devoted gardener. Except that Mary never had a garden in her life before: had never dug a hole, sown a seed, pulled a weed or done anything at all with the soil. She - like the members of the other 600 families who have moved into new homes in Ballymun in the past year - lived in one of the flats, with nowhere, except for a balcony, to grow anything.
Her neighbour, Amanda Harte, came from the same block of flats, and was similarly garden-less. But in the new house, when "the first plants went down in March, it became like a disease. Don't buy food! Buy plants!" she jokes. "Don't feed the kids! Make a garden instead!"
Another neighbour, Tina Beatty, wants her new garden to look good in all seasons, not just during the heady days of summer. With this in mind, she has arranged two groupings of fatsia, phormium, acuba and cordyline to supply evergreen, sculptural foliage year-round. Her tubs of patio plants - fuchsia, mimulus and petunia - are a picture of sophistication, in a single, deep-pink colour scheme.
Around the corner in Gerry Walsh's garden, the planting is madly exuberant. "Haphazard," he says, and then qualifies: "in a controlled fashion!" In the front, sweet pea and poppies smile over the fence, while under the sitting room window a fiery bed of nasturtiums and calendula is threaded through with the pale lilac blooms of night-scented stock. Its fragrance in the evening wafts through the open windows to perfume the whole house.
And in the back garden, there is a bit of everything: a little vegetable patch, a mini-meadow of wildflowers, numerous hanging baskets and containers, an apple tree, and even two grape vines. Aside from the sweet pea that he grew on his balcony last year (in anticipation of the move to this garden) Gerry also is completely new to matters horticultural.
These four gardeners have been bounced headlong into the whole business of sowing, growing and hoeing from the springboard of a Global Action Plan (GAP) project, funded by Ballymun Regeneration Ltd.
The "garden action teams" are composed of groups of four neighbours who meet once a week for eight weeks, under the leadership of garden designer Bernie Kinsella. She joins each team in one of their houses, where they talk about the day's topic, which might be soil, or choosing plants, or recycling and composting, or perhaps pests and companion planting. Then they do a related practical project. "But it doesn't feel all formal like that," explains Bernie. "It's more like a chat about plants or soil, or whatever, and then it's like, 'Will we go and dig now?'"
This team finished its eight-week session in early May, and have been gardening as if their lives depended on it ever since. Gerry bought himself a miniature zip-up greenhouse in which to sow seeds, and has spread his plantlets among the group. Everyone (including Bernie) has some of his sweet pea. His parsnips were less popular - a pity, as they mysteriously transmogrified into pansies, which might have been more to people's taste. Gerry laughs as much as the others at this event. "You learn by your mistakes!"
Tina, meanwhile, has plans for the autumn, when she'll be redesigning the shapes of her beds. Amanda has dug up her lawn, and will be sowing it afresh, and Mary is at battle with the caterpillars which invade her dahlias in the evening. "If it's not the caterpillars, it's the slugs," she sighs, with the stoicism of a seasoned old hand in the garden.
Yet before they did the course, "we wanted instant gardens", remembers Amanda. "We didn't want to go through the process. We never realised that you had to condition your soil by adding organic matter to it. We thought that if you just threw everything down it would grow."
"We actually would have spent a fortune on plants, and they would have died," adds Tina. But since the course, she says, "I was able to buy all my plants for a shady area, I knew what I was looking for."
Gardening, as anyone who has ever sown a seed or planted a bulb knows, is like a particularly fervent religion. Quite simply, life's so much better when you garden, and if everyone else gardened too ... well, you know the rest. Accordingly, in Ballymun, team members who have completed a course are encouraged to recruit their neighbours, and to develop their own projects in the wider community.
The name Ballymun, apparently, may come from the Irish, "Baile Muin", meaning "town of the shrubland" - a name completely at odds with the until-recently treeless and windswept character of the landscape. Now, however, as gardeners such as the foursome here take the greening of Ballymun into their capable hands, it may once again live up to its Irish name.
DIARY DATE: September 4th, "Autumn Plantsman's Day" at the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin. Talks by the gardens' experts on wild orchids, plant-hunting and the evolution of green plants; tours of the nursery and of the historic trees; and a visit to the herbarium. Fee: €50. To book, telephone: 01-8570909.
THIS WEEK'S PROJECT
SAVE TOMATO SEED Old-fashioned, heritage or heirloom tomatoes: call them what you will - if you're growing any of these old or vernacular varieties, you can save the seed and have more for free next year. Most modern tomatoes are "F1 hybrids", and will not come true from home-saved seed.
Pick a ripe, unblemished tomato from a healthy plant. Scoop out the seeds and the accompanying liquid into a small container (such as a cottage cheese tub). Add enough water to bring the level up to about a centimetre.
Put in a hot press to ferment for about four days - until a "mat" has formed on the top. Remove the mat and wash the seeds in a sieve. Dry the seeds on paper towels for a few days and then store in an airtight container in a cool place.
A simpler way to save tomato seeds is to rub them clean on a paper towel and leave them to dry. However, the fermentation process has an antibiotic effect on certain residual diseases.