WHO is that intent person who always sits in the prime ringside seat at every single garden lecture in Dublin? It's Allie Pigot, ears pinned back and pencil poised: perennial student of all things horticultural. And when she goes home, she puts into practice what she has just learned.
"One year I attended a lecture about colour. It said you must have your whites running into pale blues and then into deep blues and then into pale pinks".
And so, with bright enthusiasm, she blithely dug up her best border and replanted it according to her lecture notes. And sat back and waited for it to froth into sophisticated colour: "I looked forward with bated breath and intense excitement". Until it started to perform.
Or rather, it didn't. It bloomed all right, but what a succession of flat muted, dullness. "It was awful. It was really awful!" So much for that lecture in colour - which prompted what is still known as "the year of the bland". She had learned the hard way the misty, dreamy colour schemes need to be enlivened by "splotches that stand out and make a statement. You need your vvvumppp!"
Now there is just the right amount of vvvumppp in the little garden in Sandymount: swathes of pink, purple and blue hardy geraniums are set off by loud, florid pink poppies and electric violet alliums. The "bland border" has been given a kick in the pants by cheeky yellow day lilies and Clematis "H. F. Young", with oversize, heavenly blue blossoms like expensive silk: "Christopher Lloyd said in his book on clematis that `H. F. Young' was the best blue, so I went out and bought two."
Allie Pigot never stops learning and her talk is peppered with references to this or that garden guru. From Helen Dillon she learned about form and structure, from Penelope Hobhouse she learned how colours behave at night, and from Mother Nature she learned that the progression of colour through the seasons in the wild can be adapted to a small, suburban garden. "Early in the year I don't have any orange flowers, I keep the hot colours for later on, at the end of the season.
What Allie has learned from her mentors, she has passed on to hundreds of people over the past 30 years. For Allie Pigot is a Montessori teacher, every year guiding a score of young persons through their first steps in education. "The children love the garden. Before we go out we have a lesson to say that the garden is a place of beauty and that you must be careful with the plants. The reverence that they have is quite phenomenal."
During the year, the children plant acorns and - if all goes well - bring home an infant oak tree at the end of the summer term. And some progress to levels of expertise which many adults never achieve, like the 6 1/2 year old Francis: "He can even take cutting. He did the cuttings from my penstemon, and when a parent wanted a bit of my pieris, I got Francis to take the cutting."
Creepy crawlies are hugely popular with Allie's little students. "Today someone discovered a worm, so we did the worm: the work it does and how important it is that worms are not disturbed."
But all is not idyllic in the garden. "They actually know what a vine weevil looks like." And what about dispatching the vine weevil to its maker? "Well, we don't let any of them know it, but there is the odd bit of dispatching which goes on.