Last weekend's Bloom garden show nurtured many ideas as to just what companies could do with their landscaping, writes Emma Cullinan

GARDENS HAVE become so much more natural and loose if the show gardens and plant displays at this year's Bloom garden festival in Dublin's Phoenix Park were where the trends are at.

Ferns, fairies and forests along with freer and fluffy planting schemes were in evidence, including wispy, leggy plants such as aquilegias, poppies, woolly grasses, and giant vivid blue campanulas - popular last year and back again.

Many of the show gardens were by those who work for both small private and large corporate clients, so this could herald a change in apartment and office planting schemes, if clients were willing.

Some of the show gardens still had a strong structure, though, formed by the hardware such as stone, concrete and timber. Some of these let down the overall planting scheme by appearing too stark, such as too-perfect stone forms rather than more appealing natural, dry stone walling, for instance. Also, some of the timber was too orange, but then show gardens don't get a chance to weather and nature does beautiful things to garden materials, for instance turning orange timber to silver (unless you are an obsessive varnisher).

One garden with a strong backdrop was the Serenity Garden by Colin Brady, whose love of garden design was nurtured by his father. A cascading water wall led into a glass-covered pool with condensation droplets sparkling in the sun. Thyme set in the stone was no doubt designed to send up scents as people walked over it. That would be nice in an office environment.

In their Twilight garden, Liat and Oliver Schurmann, of the Mount Venus Nursery, used a white frame around their woodland garden, a device used to give you the feeling that you were viewing the garden through large windows. This shows how a loose garden scheme can be hauled into a strict frame. That was something also achieved by designer Mark Grehan's Inisoirr garden, with its Aran-inspired planting scheme protected by a circular stone wall. This was designed for an urban couple who wanted a touch of Inisoirr in their back plot.

While such back-to-nature gardens are perhaps linked with our new respect for the environment and a harking for our roots, the Pfizer Health and Wellness Garden by Paul Martin spelled out the health message more vividly with plenty of plants chosen for their health benefits, including herbs such as coriander and basil. The row of walls with cut-out arches framing a long pool did something nice for the psyche too.

In her Spaces Between garden Sinéad Finn used a grounded mix of linear pool, slate and stone with a black lining to give the shallow pool a feeling of depth. The pond in the Mission Impossible...Mission Accomplished garden by Eamonn Doran and Catherine Gallagher, is in metal, enhancing the shimmer of the water. The garden also includes a metal canopy, while the View Askew garden by students Jane Fitzgerald White, Svaja Vaiciuleviciute and Morag Kelly had grass chaise longues and red sculptural squares that spoke of Martha Schwartz's garden in the docklands.

Fiann O Nualláin used the grass as his sculpture, as others designers did in the show, in this case shaping it as ripples emanating from a stone ball bearing the inscription, "no more genocide". The garden was enclosed in dark walls with "Cuimhne" written in Gaelic script and translated at the other end of the wall as "memory/memorial". The message is that "man's inhumanity to man must stop"; this would make a striking commercial scheme, that would remind workers to be kind to each other!

A garden that perfectly combined hard and soft materials was the Sandscape scheme by Gerard Mullen which used a mixed concrete and mud wall which had visitors across the board oohing and ahhing. It seems humans like a bit of mud. Bright white seating and floating white "stepping stones" provided a wonderful contrast.

Sheena Vernon, who has done a number of commercial projects including a roof garden on an apartment scheme in Drogheda, created an enchanting woodland garden here, called Awaken the Magic, complete with live fairies who were captivating young children with their fantastic stories and tours of the garden looking for woodland creatures.

I admire their vigour. "Where do you get your energy?" I ask one. The reply is simple: "I'm a fairy," she says.