`There will be no hurdygurdies coming through that gate," Dominick Cullinane, the managing director of the Norwich Union Mallow International Garden Festival, told me last March when he was describing the five-day show that was to descend on Cork Racecourse at the end of June. He also stressed that everything would be done with taste. Well, my first view of the festival was of a giant Ferris wheel slowly turning against the backdrop of an un-Irish, azure-blue sky. My second and third were of a winking, man-sized gnome astride a giant mushroom and of a satin-clad, cupid's-bow-lipped lady on stilts crooning in falsetto "I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden" to a queue of startled people.
Was this tasteful? And what about the five singing sunflowers, the multi-skilled Gypsy Kathleen (predictions by palm, cards and crystal), the inflatable aliens, the percussion band banging recycled blue plastic barrels, the dozen hot-air balloons that rose at dawn and dusk, the English hucksters selling lightning-fast window-cleaning systems, the one-pound rides by horse and cart? Could these have been tasteful, too?
Actually, I didn't care. Nor, it seemed, did most of the 80,000 visitors to the festival, judging by the smiles plastered on their faces. After a slight adjustment of mood and expectations, it was hard not to have a rip-roaring, rollicking time (I even found myself longing for the odd hurdy-gurdy). There were also some rather interesting gardens.
The nucleus of this late-20th century manic fusion of carnival and gardening was a core of 16 permanent gardens (which will be open on weekends in the future) and an indeterminate number of temporary gardens (some were still being built during the festival). Indoor and outdoor stalls sold plants and other garden sundries such as conservatories, sundials, pots and mulches. Elsewhere there was a craft village, a floral art zone, a heritage and conservation exhibition, an area for eco-friendly and sustainable ideas and practices, children's workshops, grownups' seminars, artists' installations and so on, and so on, spiralling off into the whirl of the big wheel and the redolent whiff of fat from white chip vans.
But back to the middle of things: the 16 gardens that you had to queue to view. There is no space here to give a plant-by-plant and blow-by-blow account of each one, which is a pity, because there was food for thought in most of them: plenty to admire, plenty to inspire - and plenty to disagree over (as I discovered afterwards when talking to a couple of designer friends).
My favourite was a "medieval" garden, "The Bard of the Earl of Desmond's Garden", designed and constructed by Kerry residents Redmond Roche, Cathy Marshall and Steve Allin. It was not particularly innovative (indeed, one friend was moved to exasperation by its old-hatness), but it was meticulously constructed (complete with raised beds of hazel wattles and wool and a little thatched house made of hemp, ground limestone and cement), it had a well thought-out theme, and all the plants were beautifully grown and placed. And - bravo! - there was not a single inch of chipped bark, cocoa-shell or brewers' barley mulch to be seen. (While these products are wonderfully useful to the domestic gardener, they should be banned from show gardens: empty border space should be filled with mature plants - fattened up in polytunnels if necessary.)
Next door to this, "The Wood Garden", by Future Forests of Bantry, had a fabulous back wall of logs placed with the end-grain facing out; some logs were split into halfmoons, most were perfect roundels, and the effect was of an artistically eccentric honeycomb. The interstices were stuffed with moss, and in time ferns and other woodlanders will probably colonise it. This is definitely one to try at home, if you have a country garden near a wood.
More remarkable walls were the violently orange boundaries of the "Beyond 2000" garden by Jacqui Crowley Walsh, a mixum-gatherum of various modern elements. I liked the mass-planting of sculptural Eucomis under brash, white-stemmed birch trees and the noisy five-spout fountain that played in different rhythms. Not for the residential garden, though; the relentlessly plashing and bashing water and psychotic pigment would be too provocative for most families.
Another idea, however, that would translate into the family, hotel or business garden was the "Turtle Island Mound" by the American Living Earth Design Group. There was a great deal of symbolism attached to this, but essentially it was a stylised bird's-eye-view turtle created from 10 geometric raised beds built of dry-stone and planted with sedums and other low plants. Seen from the ground, the turtle is an agreeable arrangement of paths and wedge-shaped or square beds of tough little plants. From above, it is of course a turtle (an important player in the creation story for Native Americans, in case you wondered).
Other notable permanent gardens were the "Peace Garden", with its aluminium-clad rill of water and sombre, mainly-foliage planting; a lovely boulder-and-cobble garden leading to a bubbling Japanese hot-tub; a cool mosaic and pond garden perfect for the small urban space; Sandro Cafolla's map of Ireland filled with 150 native, introduced and cultivated Irish species; Deirdre Black's superminimal "Quantum Garden"; Milia Tsaoussis-Maddock's children's garden and, of course, Dominick Cullinane's half-size Gallarus Oratory (which featured in this column in April).
Among the temporary gardens, I was delighted by Macroom District Environment Group's wildlife garden and Deirdre McCarthy's "Teigh Deiseal", a trio of ground-level, Celtic-inspired spirals diligently and lovingly crafted in tiny bits of slate.
I look forward to more of this - and who knows what else - at next year's Mallow garden festival. One thing I would like to see more of - and I'm sure all keen gardeners would agree - is more plants from more specialist nurseries and horticultural clubs.
At Belfast Telegraph Garden Festival earlier in June, there were some wonderful displays of bonsai, cacti, carnivorous plants, alpines, orchids, perennials, hostas . . . Mallow, take note please. But in the meantime, keep up the mad, energetic, creative, hard work!