If I had a bag of well-rotted manure for every time a garden festival organiser told me their show was going to be an Irish-style Chelsea Flower Show, I'd have a very fertile garden.
And pardon me if that sounds rudely jaded, but I - like many other Irish gardeners - am suffering from Irish garden festival fatigue. In the past few years we have had a number of major garden festivals that promised the world - and Chelsea - and ended up giving us a handful of nicely-designed gardens and trade stands, a barrow-load of mediocre ones, and great expanses of miscellaneous tat. What have stalls selling go-faster potato-peelers, healthy-glow face powder and faux-gold-by-the-metre jewellery got to do with gardening?
They have nothing to do with gardening at all, but a lot to do with the systematic antagonisation of the Irish gardening public. What we gardeners want from a garden festival is to be saturated with gardening: to be enthralled by well-conceived and stunning display gardens, to be driven crazy with desire for hitherto unobtainable plants and clever tools, to be confused, dazzled and educated by garden concepts we have never met before.
We want to go home filled to the gills with gardening, and bursting with new ideas for our own patches. We do not want to learn how to speed-polish our family silver or whisk our dog's hairs off the hearth rug, for goodness sake.
I'm not sure, but I think that Dominick Cullinane, managing director of this year's completely new Mallow Garden Festival, has taken this on board. "There will be no hurdy-gurdies coming through that gate," he promises. The quality will be guaranteed, he says, because the five-day show (from June 23rd to 27th) at the Mallow Racecourse is being run by horticulturists. It will be, he pledges, in his own version of the Gettysburg Address: "Of the gardeners, by the gardeners and for the gardeners." It will also be - wait for it - "Chelsea-style - with an Irish flavour, and a bit more entertainment value."
Let's address the entertainment bit first, which sounds a little as if Chelsea Garden Show goes to the county fair. There will be street theatre, medieval jousting, 21 hot air balloons (if a sponsor can be found), a craft village, face-painting, Irish dancing and brass bands. (But no hurdy-gurdies.) There will be "something there for everybody. The beauty of it is that it will not be crass," Cullinane assures the sceptics. "Everything will be done with taste."
The main thing will be "the gardens and the horticultural side of things," he vows. Central to the plan is a group of 15 permanent gardens and a maze which will be maintained as an ongoing visitor attraction on the site. The maze - still to be planted - will be constructed of dozens of different hedging varieties so that people can see how certain plants perform.
Meanwhile, 40 to 50 temporary gardens and garden exhibits will be created by nurseries and other purveyors of garden-related goods. "We've said to people," says Cullinane, "you have to make an effort and have a really nice display. You can't just come and put the pots out!"
Well-known Cork nurseries which will be making the effort include Carewswood, Con Sullivan's, and the local Lemon Tree Garden Centre from Mallow. From other counties come Tipperary's Slattery's Roses, Galway's Blue Poppy Nursery and McLysaght's from Limerick.
As for the permanent displays, one of the most inventive-sounding is a garden designed for small children by landscape architect, Milia Tsaoussis. It will be a busy, colourful little landscape filled with specially-commissioned sculptures, a miniature tunnel of woven willow, a boardwalk, a bubbling (and safe) water feature and mounded earthworks planted with dwarf plants and scented herbs.
In ascetic contrast to all this bustle is Cullinane's own show garden, a half-size recreation of the Dingle peninsula's Gallarus Oratory. Largely finished now and built of Castlehaven stone and Liscannor flags, it has taken a JCB, two mini-diggers, a dumper and 10 men more than a month to build.
Frondy tree-ferns and drifts of fuchsia and montbretia will soften the severity of the stone. And it is hoped the Gallarus Garden itself, completed three months before the start of the festival, will soften the critics of Mallow Garden Festival - which has had to pay the price, in advance, of other less-than-perfect shows in this country. "A lot of people are sitting on the fence going `Ooooh, another bloody garden festival'," says Cullinane. "But we're out to prove without a shadow of doubt that we're onto something very, very special."
Inquiries regarding exhibition space: The Mallow Garden Festival Office, The Media Factory, 4 Father Matthew Street, Cork, tel: 021 270657, fax: 021-275832. Cork diary dates:
April 16th, 7.45 p.m.: Paul Maher of the National Botanic Gardens will give a lecture on Plants and Ferns at S.M.A. Hall, Wilton, Cork, in association with the Irish Garden Plant Society.
April 17th: Gorgeous Garden Ideas, a day-long course with Helen Dillon, at Ballymaloe Cookery School, Shanagarry, Co Cork. Fee, including lunch: £90. Inquiries: 021 646785.