Design Solutions/Noelle Anne Curren: It's just as well that Noelle Anne Curren lives in a Rathfarnham house built in 1936.

"They gave you a bit of space back then," she says of the land to the rear of the house where she has created several small gardens with the one area, something that would not be possible to do with the tiny patches that adjoin most modern homes.

There's a Mediterranean garden and a formal garden but the one that caused most difficulty was the woodland area. "It was shaded and dark," she says. "I needed to do something to give it a bit of zip."

That was several years ago and well before Diarmuid Gavin made his name. "Diarmuid helped me create a Trompe l'Oeil effect with mirror and an old gate. The idea was to make it appear as if there is a gateway in the wall into the next-door garden."

It wasn't as easy as it looks, she says. "You can't just put a mirror on a wall and leave it at that. You have to be aware of what will be reflected, so it looks as if you might really walk through into another space."

In this case natural grasses and ferns are planted opposite the mirror.

"You've also got to frame the edges of the mirror - I did it with ivy. Diarmuid came up the idea of putting the gate at a 45 degree angle so it looks as if it's opening slightly."

The whole thing worked: "I had a friend here one day and she said, 'There's a woman over there wearing the same dress as me'."

Its success led Noelle Anne to create a stone bridge - with landscape architect Peter Boland - in the corner of the woodland garden with a mirror under its arch.

From underneath the mirror, an artificial stream flows.

It looks anything but artificial, however, because the mirror creates an effect as it meanders off into the distance.

"Standing here I could be in the middle of a wood even though I'm in suburbia," says Noelle Anne, proof that the clever use of mirrorprovided the 'bit of zip' that she was looking for.

Peter Boland, Vision Landscapes. Tel: 087 2626257