On Aug 11, 11:39 am, aquachimp
wrote:
On Aug 11, 10:02 am, paddyenglishman
wrote:

On Aug 9, 2:51 pm, aquachimp
wrote:

Anyone visited the curiously named "International Garden Festival"
near Portlaoise, Ireland

If you go let us know if its any good. precious few garden shows i
get to hear about over here. mallow was ok

Well, for a starters, here's the link;http://www.internationalgardenfestival.com/home.html

The day I went was miserable (weather wise).
I thought it would be along the lines of something I saw elsewhere
once, which took a whole day to get around.
Admiteddly, to stroll around the general properties of the site
concerned would probably take that long, but the err... "festival"
site itself... an hour is more than enough.

It costs 13 euro (adult price) to get in.
So, you'll be wondering if that's worth it.
Excluding the opportunity to explore a vast parkland ordinarily (I
think) no open to the public, I'd say the garden festival bit is not
worth looking at, let alone pay to get into.

One woman passed us and simply uttered the exclaimation "Dreadful!"
I can't disagree with her, though found that a bit strong. Yes, there
was evidence of lack of care of the exhibits (weeds, rubbish, poor
grass cutting ... if any)

oops, gotta go, will gaet back later (I hope0

Ah, yes, the state of the place.

Weeds, terrible maintenance, dead plants and so on.
On the dead plants (including dead moss) I noticed quite a few
"gardens" "growing" the same stuff, e.g. carpinus hedging, golden hop
and moss, much of it left rotting.)

Actually, some of the failures provide what might have been an
unintentional advantage.
So often, one sees a garden in a garden show, and a reasonably wary
eye can see that its OK for the moment... IE, it's design is anti-
maintenance. Strictly short, short term and wholly impractical.

Some of the gardens of this show belong to that category and were it
not for the somewhat painful waste of time going there, it would be
amusing to see how pretentious designs, with no thought for after
care, manage to come undone in such a short time, (-:

The worst example being a garden, the name of which I forget, but I
can see how the initial concept might have looked promising.
It was a sort of skeletal computer graphics model of a mound,
translated into reality , i.e. wooden battens were positioned to
imitate such a computer generated model. There was grass and other
stuff in between.

Speaking of design... there seems to be a general trend to explore the
origins/ roots/ ancestry of (garden) creativity and the link between
mankind and nature but without any organisers *statement to that
effect....and without any real nod to history. Along with no real nod
to nature, natural evolution, geology... I could go one, though in
fairness, if one were to create an opera around that theme, it might
also omit such reference. Probably why I hate opera.

*Statement, merely scattering the 15 "gardens"
(OK, one was not great, but clever and one was really, really good and
would compete with anything in UK shows)
within a field of oats for that primitive stone-age look (inaccurate
too) and lots of hop, albeit the golden variety, to suggest booze
making hobbies... if there's such a thing as oats based booze, is not,
IMO what amounts to a joined-up-writing sort of statement.

Maybe they should have gone for barley

In that sense there was no real honesty about the show or, maybe a
simple lack of communication between the "Garden Festival" and it's
audience

Many of the only 15 gardens tried to explore this area. The computer
model mentioned above might also have been trying to do so by way of a
"garden" which emcompassed the beginnings of something (the skeletal
lines), with the added dimension of being bang up to date by means of
the 'beginnings' being computer generated. Geddit!

Another actually mentioned the link between whether nature is of/
within man or vice versa. I can't remember how he put it. His effort
to to explore that was a number of what looked like very high, wide
and thin stone head-stones (graveyard), set out like soldiers rather
than some sort of stone-henge feel. There was one side polished, the
other sawn and the audience being invited to comment on the sawn side.
The result.... graffitii all over (both sides).

Ah, I've just that, what with that exhibit, the general decay of the
state of the "Garden Festival", maybe the implied theme was not about
origins of creation, creativity and it's links to mankind. maybe the
whole thing was just about death and decay... and the end of
creativity and the end of mankind.

Good look to you if you go. I'd like to apologise in advance if your
disappointment was of result of my inadvertently and wholly
unintentionally having said something that might have accidentally
created the impression it was interesting.

That said, the best "garden" of all, other than the really good one
mentioned, was hanging flags. Lots and lots of large flags hanging
down almost to the ground and creating a sort of maze. There were only
3 plants in the centre. It was fun, unexpectedly looked good and
physically felt good.