The best of Bloom: Six gardens you should see at this year's festival

'Darkness Into Light' Pieta House Garden
The brilliant Irish street artist and illustrator Joe Caslin made the cover of the New York Times newspaper earlier this month with a photograph of his outdoor mural of two men embracing, a giant biodegradable image which the artist temporarily installed on the side of a building on the corner of Dublin's South Great Georges Street. Now it's Bloom's turn to feature the artist's work, with a haunting wall mural of two young men (best friends) first used as part of Caslin's 2014 project, Our Nation's Sons – a series of installations that figured large-scale portrait drawings of young men marginalised by society.

The graphic image features in the wonderful “Darkness Into Light – Pieta House Garden”, which was created by Dublin-based designer Niall Maxwell, where it brilliantly underscores the garden’s central theme, one of hope and healing. Based in Lucan in Co Dublin, Pieta House is a centre for the prevention of self-harm or suicide which offers a free, therapeutic approach to anyone who requires it. Its striking street art aside, Maxwell’s show garden is faultless, filled with a multitude of thoughtful and expertly executed design details and elegant planting (fat box balls, drifts of Carex testacea, Iris Tulip Festival, Verbascum “Gainsborough”) that combine to create something rich in atmosphere.

Christopher White's 'The Emereld Isle'
The well-known Dublin-based floral designer Christopher White won a silver-gilt medal at this year's Chelsea Flower Show – his seventh Chelsea medal since he started exhibiting there in 2009 – with an exhibit entitled The Emerald Isle, inspired by his friendship with the late British floral artist Mary Griffiths. He's now recreated his exhibit at Bloom, where it takes pride of place in the Nursery & Floral Pavilion.

White’s floral display uses sculptural pieces of bog oak and contorted willow through which the designer has woven the lime-green flowers of “Bells of Ireland”, Dianthus “Green Trick” and Chrysanthemum “Shamrock” alongside an array of foliage including variegated laurel, ferns, and conifers.

The award-winning design, which follows an Irish heritage theme, also uses turf, potatoes and ornamental cabbages, proving that unconventional of materials can be used creatively; all it takes is an artist’s eye.

Mount Venus Nursery display
Bloom's giant nursery and floral pavilion is always an enticing place for plant lovers, and this year is no exception. In particular, look out for the Mount Venus Nursery where owner Oliver Schurmann has designed a magical display that included the deliciously fragrant flowers of the lemon day lily, Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus.

As for the many other covetable plants included in this year’s displays, where do I start? Different varieties of geums aside (varieties of this long-flowering perennials were the “It Girls” of both Chelsea and Bloom), I spotted the following; the red/rose-pink flowered, dwarf perennial wallflower “Red Jep” (Riverlane Nursery); Delphinium “Sweet Sensation”, a, compact variety bred in Scotland, with double flowers in fashionably faded shades of peacock-blue and mauve, like something out of an Edwardian watercolour (Kilmurry Nursery); Lupin “Salmon Star” and “Towering Inferno”, two fiery-coloured varieties from the much lauded Westcountry series (Boyne Garden Centre); the flame-coloured, free flowering perennial Potentilla “Flamenco” and the elegantly understated, newly launched Baptisia “Dutch Chocolate” (Camolin Potting Shed); and the ghostly Japanese aralia, Fatsia “Spider’s Web”, whose architectural leaves are edged in silver-white (Rare Plants Ireland).

Liat Schurmann's 'Pan' garden
While her husband Oliver was kept busy with the creation of Mount Venus Nursery's display in Bloom's Floral Pavilion, Liat Schurmann had her mind on other things, having being commissioned by Warner Brothers to create a show garden that celebrates the upcoming launch of Pan, a movie based on JM Barrie's classic children's book Peter Pan. The resulting garden is full of quirky creative touches, including some very clever design elements that could be used in any garden.

Liat’s use of mirrors to create an illusion of depth and space by manipulating the viewer’s visual understanding of the garden is one example. A semicircular pool appears circular, while the boundaries of the garden are cleverly blurred. She also uses ordinary building materials in extraordinary ways, such as the garden’s carefully contoured concrete walls, which she handmoulded using hessian.

David Shackleton garden
Ireland's rich gardening heritage owes much to the eagle-eyed gardeners and plant collectors of previous generations. Among them was the late David Shackleton, whose walled garden at Beech Park in Clonsilla, Co Dublin, was famed for its remarkable collection of rare and exotic plants before it fell into decline some decades ago.

Beech Park is now in the process of being restored by Fingal County Council with the help of students from the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, individual volunteers, and participants of Gateway (the local authority work opportunities scheme). Their collective exhibit at this year’s Bloom (small garden category) gives a poignant but intriguing sense of the garden during its heyday, while also highlighting their ongoing work to restore the world-famous Shackleton plant collection to something of its former glory (only 5-10 per cent of the herbaceous plants survived the garden’s years of neglect).

Breffni McGeough's 'Saison' garden
While the use of upcycled/ salvaged materials is a recurring theme of many of Bloom's show gardens this year, designer Breffni McGeough used it with great aplomb in his brilliant show garden "Saison". Old cedar decking, rusted steel panelling salvaged from a ship, salvaged windows temporarily borrowed from a friend's glasshouse, recycled paving stones and a delightfully rough-hewn 'brewing shed' constructed from wooden pallets all feature in McGeough's innovative design.

Much of its success, as well as its great charm, lies in this young designer’s flexible, spontaneous approach to the garden’s creation; when the barley plants he’d planned to use as part of the planting failed to flourish, at the last minute McGeough found a friendly Wicklow farmer, Tommy Delahunt of Ballinaclough, who allowed him to dig up some plants from one of his fields. The resulting ‘barley field in miniature’, which McGeough has artfully embellished with a sprinkling of black cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris “Ravenswing”) is one of the standout features of this year’s Bloom.

As for the garden’s micro-brewery, which had yet to be installed at the time of my visit, it’s the work of McGeough’s friend, the craft-beer brewer Alex Lawes, who promises that the result will be “a garden saison for a saison garden; a ‘lacto sour’ flavoured with thyme and rosemary.”

Bloom runs from today until 6pm on Monday. For details of the show, see bloominthepark.com. Its street-based ‘younger sister’, the Bloom Fringe festival, takes part in various locations around Dublin city from today until June 1st. See bloomfringe.com for details