Last year, at the Garden and Landscape Designers Association's second annual seminar, a packed auditorium heard - among other things - about the wonderfully creative "Divorce Garden", devised by the American designer, Topher Delany. The patio which her client's ex-husband had made was ceremoniously jack-hammered apart and the upended pieces were erected like tombstones and interplanted with the crimson blood-grass, Imperata cylindrica `Rubra'. This extraordinary operation demonstrated that - with the help of an imaginative international garden designer - revenge can be very, very sweet. Delany's story was given a special, wry twist because it was delivered to her transfixed audience on Valentine's Day.
The menu for this year's seminar, "Dynamic Styles for Future Gardens" promises to be just as stimulating - if not so sweet-and-sour as last year's. Again, there is an impressive international line-up: Allain Provost from France, the American-born UK-resident Charles Jencks, the German-born Cornelia Hahn Oberlander from Canada, and Ireland's Angela Jupe, a founding member and the first chairman of the two-year-old GLDA.
Allain Provost has worked on a string of prestigious landscape contracts in four continents. Perhaps his most exotic project was the presidential palace in Ivory Coast, Africa - while his best-known is the Parc Andre Citroen, in Paris. The latter, a five-acre site bordering the Seine, is a clever combination of big landscaping - to complement the monumental buildings around it - and small mini-gardens that provide endless inspiration for the domestic gardener.
The work of Charles Jencks is not easily described in a couple of paragraphs, and trying to comprehend the mighty brain-work behind it has had my poor head in a spin for days. His landscape designs draw on ideas such as chaos theory (general knowledge buffs will recognise this as the concept where the flutter of a butterfly wing can eventually cause a hurricane), fractal geometry, the structure of DNA, black holes and the history of the universe. If you - like me - were utterly hopeless at physics at school, your impulse might be to run a mile from this dizzying stuff.
But then you would miss out on some of the most graceful, sinuous and utterly gobsmacking landscape architecture in the world. His Garden of Cosmic Speculation in the Scottish Borders is a beautiful thing, even if you have only a feeble grasp of its meaning. Precisely-measured hills and land-shapes swirl up from the ground and dip down again, looping across lakes of reflective water. Cosmic sculptures pop up here and there: models of DNA's double helix, a roof-ridge topped with mathematical equations, spheres depicting theories of the universe. The whole lot is kept under control by a team of four gardeners, with one of them working five days a week keeping the grass mown during the growing season (growth can be such a problem with landworks such as this).
How completely different is the work of the ecologically-minded Cornelia Hahn Oberlander - and full marks to the seminar organisers for presenting two such contrasting speakers. She believes that any forays into the landscape should be carried out with minimum intrusion, and with maximum regard for the natural attributes of the area - such as plants, geology and climate.
Instead of trim green swards, she favours making meadows of native grasses: "we are wasting a lot of energy and manpower keeping our lawns neat," she said in an interview some time ago. Her planting schemes are almost exclusively composed of native species, and her working ethos can be summed up in the crisp, meaty phrases: "Grow what you see. Restore what is natural. Use local plants and soil. Don't reinvent the wheel."
The last speaker, Angela Jupe, will be looking at garden design in Ireland. She is particularly concerned that the complete sensual enjoyment of gardens is no longer part of the brief for many contemporary designers: "Some modern landscape architecture feeds only the eyes, and forgets that we have noses for scent and hands for touch."
The "low maintenance" garden, she says, has a lot to answer for. Not only is there too much hard landscaping, but "it leads to plants that grow into a little circle" requiring no pruning, care, or attention. "The senses are being blocked out. You don't have a wish to run your hand over a domed hebe, and there is certainly no smell off it!"
Jupe also encourages us to be aware of the "greater landscape outside the door. Nowadays people's lifestyles mean that they want to cocoon themselves when they get home." Instead, she urges, "Don't cut off the outside. There might be an interesting tree-shape on a hill half a mile away that could be `brought into' the garden through a gap in the boundary."
All of the above gives us plentiful food for thought. And if this seminar is anything like the last two, I know that I will be ruminating for days afterwards.
The GLDA seminar will be held at The Industry Centre, UCD, Belfield on February 13th. Tickets (which must be booked in advance) cost £60 and include a buffet lunch and refresh- ments. Inquiries to Koraley Northen (GLDA administrator), 73 Deerpark Road, Mount Merrion, Co Dublin. Telephone: 01-2781824, fax: 01- 2835724