Bord Bia's Bloom kicks off another year full of lush gardens, live music, food trucks and a 99 cone or two, giving guests the perfect excuse to make the most of the spectacular weather.
Now in its 17th year, the gardening festival takes place over five days on the June Bank Holiday weekend (June 1st – 5th), and runs from 9am to 6pm daily, promising plenty of opportunities to check out the food fair, plant nurseries and, of course, the show gardens.
RTÉ Lifestyle went along to the preview of the stunning gardens, where we caught up with Brian Burke, the Woody's Gardening Expert and one of the RTÉ Super Garden judges.
When it comes to separating a seasoned gardener from a novice, Burke says it comes down to consistency and restraint. As a judge on Super Garden, he's gotten used to analysing what makes an outdoor space work, and chief among that is balance.
"The modern dynamic family garden has to, by definition, almost have a lot of built elements: covered spaces, garden rooms, a lot of paved areas, maybe a deck, maybe a pergola, a terrace, something like that. So all of those elements are fine, but they need, in order for it to be consistent and harmonious, it has to be balanced well with planting."
He added that sticking to a few key colours and textures will make your garden look more polished and professional. "It's a hallmark of an inexperienced designer or an inexperienced gardener to kind of throw the kitchen sink into a garden, to throw every colour they've ever seen into a garden", he said.
"And it can sometimes the chaos can have an appeal, but a lot of times it just looks chaotic. It looks very muddled and very loud and very incoherent."
Different types of paving, stone, wood and colours can also come across too busy, he said. "To pull off something really good with the minimum amount of plants, plant species and the minimum amount of hard materials is quite a feat. And that's the challenge."
Burke has created Woodie's show garden this year, called As I Live and Breathe, which he said is inspired by "the idea that anyone can create a garden".
"You come to a show like Bloom and you look around some of the show gardens and a lot of them are fantastical spaces. They're head-turning, inspiring spaces, but they're unattainable to a lot of people because they contain a lot of bespoke elements, a lot of commission feature, a lot of steel, a lot of heavy stone work.
"It's not practical for a lot of people, given the fact that most of us now live in that suburban environment and we have quite a limited space to work with and limited access."
Outdoor spaces can be easily built with some guidance and practice, Burke added.
"If you've never picked up a plant or never picked up a drill in your life, the first part of the process will be rocky. Of course, it will, you're learning skills, but as you go along, you're going to hone those skills, you're going to become more familiar with plant material and how they go together. You're going to develop carpentry skills, you're going to develop general construction skills."
Unlike a show garden, he added, it doesn't have to be completed in a time crunch. "You can chip away at these things. Once you have a plan in place, you don't have to do it in a week or a month or even over a summer. It can be a prolonged long-term project."
Covered spaces are trending in garden design, particularly post-Covid, Burke said. While our summers can be warm, rain is an ever-present threat and the typical way of building covered space is to attach it to the back door, he said.
"What I've done in is I've kind of inverted that whole approach and I've put the covered spaces at the back of the garden, at the back and at the side of the garden. So it forces you to go through the garden, settle yourself in the covered space and then you're looking back towards your house, looking back across the garden."
When it comes to dreaming up your home garden, Burke's key piece of advice is to stop and think realistically about how you'll use and maintain the space. "Assess genuinely how passionate you are about plants, how much time you want to spend caring for plants, and then how does your lifestyle work? What are your working hours? Are you available weekends?
"It's all about being smart and being candid with yourself about the time you have available to do the maintenance tasks and pick the plants and pick the materials accordingly."
