AH, February days! Massed bulbs straining their way through the soil, fully blossom on winter cherries and low shafts of sun picking out the warm, bright stems of ornamental dogwood and willow.
But not in your garden. Or mine. Most likely the one staring balefully at you from the other side of the window is an altogether different affair. Honestly, the February garden can be a dismal place. Your best bet is to throw down that unwilling trowel and get off to the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, pronto. A visit at this time is a potent horticultural pick me up, both restorative and narcotic.
You start to feel better as soon as you enter the gates when a tower of variegated holly shimmies its jolly, red berries at you. Behind it, the Persian iron wood (Parroiia persica) is a confused mass of low slung, leafless branches studded with teeny winecoloured flowers, all leggy stamens and no petals. And on the way to the glasshouses (for that is why you are here) a lopsided ash - half weeping, half not - cuts a preposterous silhouette. Nobody at the gardens can explain it: "We don't have a history of it," says the director, Donal Synnott, "but obviously something happened to the grafts on one side. I'm always hoping I'll find a really knowledgeable person who will explain it to me.
Turner's long range of glasshouses was restored recently, and the creamy tracery of the ironwork is a breathtaking sight, an airy and monumental feat of Victorian engineering. Turner even designed the glass to be self cleaning: the bottom of each pane is scientifically curved so that it feeds the flow of rain onto the pane below, cleansing it from the middle to the sides.
Inside, much of the space is not yet planted, and lots of the existing plants are only in the infant stages. This will cheer many gardeners; even great botanic institutions have to start from scratch sometimes. And besides, how gratifying to be able to say, "Ha! My Hoya carnosa is bigger than yours!"
The star performers here are the vireyas, tender rhododendrons from southeast Asia with candy coloured blooms. The Victorians were barmy about vireyas, and you can see why - just look at Rhododendron javancum with its orange sorbet trumpets and raspberry red stamens. But the craze for vireyas died out. "Rhododendrons are very beautiful, but overpowering," explains Donal Synnott. "There are 900 species and many thousands of cultivars and hybrids. You have to be a genius to cope with them. I think that after a while people get `rhododendron sickness'." The best way, says Donal, to enjoy Glasnevin's vireyas - the first here since the 1880s - is "just to sit back in awe".
Over at the Cactus House, awe is too small a word for the feeling that overcomes you in this hot, dry place of enormous, ferocious, spiny characters. "Please do not handle plants," reads an embossed notice. You must be joking, you think, you wouldn't touch them with a barge pole: any idiot can see that these plants bite. But, viewed from a safe distance, this is a formidable gathering: the man size rosette of the blue Agave lurida; the much branched Euphorbia candilabra, about to go through the roof; the slim Rauhocereus riosaniensis pushing itself, pillar straight through the stony sand. They're the juggernaut versions of those small, dusty specimens that many of us have on forgotten windowsills.
The Cactus House leads to the Fern House, a steamy haven for all manner of fronded species - from the big Australian tree fern to the little Killarney fern, almost rendered extinct by another Victorian fad. It's kept alive and well here, locked away in a special high humidity glass room.
Jungle weather hits you when you enter the Great Palm House. Heavy pipes under the staging blast out warm air into the damp, tropical foliage which reaches up to brush the dome, 65 feet above. Wrist thick bamboos jostle with bananas, figs, and palms. The frothy, pink blossomed Dombeya scrambles up the cast iron columns. Rare cycads look like stunted palms with craggy stems. The ones here are a hundred years old - and looking mighty fine.
In the adjoining Orchid House you can see the descendants of the first orchid seeds germinated and brought to flower "in captivity" in the 1840s. Their delicately painted flowers are artificially exquisite, each one a confection of pink, white, yellow - that is, all except for a noxious, mucous coloured Paphiopedilum. What creature pollinates this?
Out in the cool February air again, although much of the Botanic Gardens is still asleep, there is more to see the long rat tail inflorescences of Garrya, the evergreen tassel tree; the watery yellow flowers of wintersweet - and yes, down by the river, the warm, bright stems of ornamental dogwood and willow picked out by low shafts of winter sun.