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 a three people have been indicted and trials are not now expected to begin until the autumn.
The Rwandan government and parliament have now approved a grading system to be applied to the detainees. "The first category his the authors and organisers of the genocide," says Ms Inyumba. "Then there are people who killed massively. After that are those who killed fewer."
The Minister of State, Ms Joan Burton, said that on a recent visit to detention camps in Rwanda, she met people who said "I only killed eight" and felt they should, therefore, be released. A local mayor's daughter had explained to them that she had only killed a couple of hundred, suggesting that was comparatively few.
"How do you release these people back to the community of survivors?" asks Ms Inyumba.
Rwanda's communities will not be rebuilt and its predominantly agricultural economy will not recover until people believe that the guilty have been punished and believe they are safe again in their homes.
The Rwandan government needs this to happen. It wants to get people back on the land to produce food. According to Ms Inyumba, it wants to be able to feed the population from Rwanda's resources within five years.
"We have no excuse not to be able to feed our own people. We have a good climate, two crops a year, we can grow maize and sorghum. Yet 95 per cent of our people live below the poverty line."
Ms Inyumba is 32. She was financial manager and quarter master of the Rwandan Patriotic Front before it took power in Rwanda in 1994. That year she became one of the youngest ministers in Rwanda's government of National Unity.
She says she would like the international community to stop looking at Rwanda as a humanitarian issue and to focus on development programmes. Health programmes and local economic development would allow Rwandans to take responsibility for dealing with the aftermath of the genocide.