Bloom

Ireland's main garden show has its eye on the Chelsea Flower Show as both a model and a goal. Having been to both, I would say that the Irish show has a way to go but that Chelsea could watch its back just a bit. Bloom takes place in Phoenix Park on the edge of Dublin, an enormous swath of land that is, at over 700 acres, the largest enclosed urban park in Europe. On a hot bank holiday Monday the park was already jammed when I got there about 10:30. This was virtually the first decent weather that we had had, and everyone was wandering about in tank tops and sandals. The scene reminded me of the parks in London on the first real summer day; the very pale-skinned office workers bask in the sunshine, and you can practically feel the heat of their sunburns rising off of them as you walk by. Irish skin is if anything even more delicate; they should have been handing out sunscreen along with the The Irish Times at the gate.

         My friend Isobel and I have an annual day out at the San Francisco Garden Show, and I was curious to see how our show held up to Bloom. No contest: Bloom sweeps San Francisco right off the garden plot. The first thing I noticed were the number of families. Kids are free at Bloom, and families obviously take full advantage of this. (Otherwise the tickets are very expensive, at €25, or nearly $40, for an adult. This was a splurge of a day for me.) Isobel and I go to the garden show during the week, so we may not see how many kids come on the weekend, but for Dubliners this was clearly a family day; I think the San Francisco demographic is quite different.

         This show had everything. Inside the main hall there were elaborately constructed wedding bowers, but there was also a gorgeous display of produce in carefully constructed mounds. The Irish Craft Council is given major space in the retail hall; ceramists were throwing pots on a small wheel next to the stalls selling garden tools and outdoor ware. Of course there were weavers. I spent a long time talking with the stone carvers, and will try to get to one of their studios before I leave.

         The show gardens, all outdoors, were small miracles of scale and freedom. There were truly teeny plots along one side, dressed up to resemble cottage gardens in an Irish village. There was a replica in small scale of Darwin's garden to mark his 200th birthday, with markers explaining how he grew various weeds to test their survival ability. The best of the larger gardens were characterized by their embrace of the natural, as if the gardeners had come along a month earlier and scattered seed in the wet earth, although of course every inch of these gardens is planned down to the last detail. There was very little of the relentless hardscape plans we always see in San Francisco, since it's in the hardscape that money is made. When there was hardscape here it went all the way: one garden had nothing but long bright red sticks stuck in gravel to represent plants. The winning garden seemed somewhat mundane to me, but that might be because it resembled so many I have seen in San Francisco (and indeed at my only visit to Chelsea, which by the way was with Isobel's sister Tess): careful planting, walkways, the table set up with wine glasses, a water feature or two, and the latest garden must-have, a plant wall. I fell in love with a garden that looked like it had been gently flown in whole from a back garden in the country here, although the one with the chickens was a close second.

         Phoenix Park contains a walled garden of several acres which forms part of the show. It is planted in vegetables except for a massive herbaceous border that is planted in precise mirror image on both sides of the main path. While Isobel would have been appalled at number of plant names I have forgotten, I was able to identify catmint to two women looking at the herbaceous bed. (This might be because the stuff grows practically wild in my front yard, the only plants to manage to look healthy throughout the long dry summer.)

         What San Francisco definitely does not have at its garden show is food. At Bloom there is a building entirely devoted to Irish artisanal food products, nearly every one of them offering generous tastes. I had goat and sheep's cheeses, hummous, pickles, bread, sausages of all sorts, and as many jams, preserves, chutneys and relishes as I could have possibly wanted to eat. There were chocolate bars, truffles, and desserts piled high, and although I tend toward the savory rather than the sweet I did notice that the purveyors of sweets were far less generous with their samples than was everyone else. Perhaps they have found it isn't worth it, as people will buy their biscuits, scones and crumbles anyway.

         After all the tasting, lunch wasn't much of a necessity, which was a pity, since there was a very decent looking glassed-in cafe in the center of the show grounds. (Just outside the cafe was a replica of the new White House vegetable garden, an Irish homage to America's new regime.) What I did eat was a plateful of organic, vegan, raw salads. Every one of the six salads I chose was handmade and incredibly fresh. I loved them all, although I now know that eating raw chickpeas, even well prepared, is not something I should do with my allergies.

         I was of course not able to buy any of the thousands of plants on offer. What I came away with was a small wheel of sheep's cheese, tied with raffia, that still held the imprint of the cheesecloth it had been aged in, a small round of honey and garlic goat's cheese, a container of hummous (about which the sales person said, It should keep for awhile, I made it last night), and a tiny glass jar of sweet pepper relish. I took the sheep's cheese as a hostess gift to the barbecue I was invited to that evening; it was slightly sharp, smooth, and delicious.