So much has changed in a decade - for better and worse, writes Jane Powers
Time flies when you're having fun. This week it is 10 years since I started writing this column, yet it seems as if it has been only half that time. But how things have changed. A decade ago, for example, organic gardening was still on the margins of horticulture, seen by some as a method practised only by airy-fairy nutcases and tree-huggers. Now, however, earth-aware cultivation raises applause rather than eyebrows, and many gardeners, even if they are not "organic", prefer to avoid artificial remedies and additives. Organic gardening, of course, is far more than just shunning chemicals: it's about looking after your soil, being vigilant, fostering diversity, recycling your waste and generally working with nature rather than against it. All of these ideas have become mainstream in the past 10 years.
Chelsea Flower Show, a reliable (if rather flashy) barometer of horticultural trends, increasingly includes gardens featuring meadows, wildlife and other eco-friendly concepts. Yes, 10 years on, organic gardening has finally come into the fold. (Further evidence of this is that I've just mentioned the word "organic" five times, and hardly anyone batted an eyelid.)
Ironically, organic gardening requires the one thing of which we have less and less: time. So perhaps it's not a bad thing that gardens in new houses have become smaller and smaller. Lawns, the great time-eaters, are also shrinking - or are being done away with altogether. Decking, a versatile all-weather surface, has spread like a wooden rash over the face of Ireland's back gardens. It looks chic and snappy when teamed with contemporary architecture but a little incongruous when jammed against a privet hedge behind an Edwardian house. Alan Titchmarsh, who was hefting his spade all over the television until a couple of years ago, was a staunch advocate of decking (and blue paint: remember that?), but he forgot to warn us about its slipperiness and about the desirability of its underparts as a home for rodents.
Makeover programmes made gardening more popular than any of us who actually garden would ever have thought possible. It was constantly, if you recall, dubbed the "sex of the 1990s". Imagine that. Suddenly everyone wanted a garden. Instantly, of course. But television gardens need last only as long as the cameras are rolling, and they are made even sexier by clever lighting and lenswork. And gardens are not static. They grow. Plants that form part of a perfect tableau one month set off on missions of their own the next - getting bigger, floppier, older or more demanding, or just looking all wrong, or maybe even dying and making a hole in the design. When the reality doesn't meet the expectations that have been set up by the glamour on the television, disillusionment sets in. So gardening, I'm afraid, isn't quite so sexy any more.
But outdoor living is. The garden has become another room, with furniture, lighting, patio heater and ornamental water feature (don't get me started on hot tubs). For some people, growing things has become incidental to all of this; plants are essential wallpaper in the outdoor room, but how terribly inconvenient when they drop their leaves on the terracotta tiles.
I know, I sound petulant. But after 10 years there are some things I want to get off my chest. So let me also lament the loss of basic skills such as propagating, pruning and seed-saving; the decline of horticultural societies and clubs; the paving-over of front gardens; the inappropriate and ostentatious use of tree ferns and other trophy plants; and the metamorphosis of garden centres into gift shops.
But hold on. Didn't I say at the beginning that I had been having fun for the past 10 years? Well, yes, actually I have. In the world of garden design the changes have been exhilarating. A wave of naturalism has swept aside the neatly-tiered herbaceous borders and the nostalgia-heavy old roses of the 1980s and 1990s. Artists with plants, such as the Dutchman Piet Oudolf, the German-American duo Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden and the Briton Tom Stuart-Smith, have painted the landscape with bursts and swathes of grasses and perennials. Their garden designs, and those of the many other practitioners who have embraced this free-flowing style, have an energy we've not seen before. The caress of the breeze on a whoosh of grass, the glint of the sun on a sea of backlit petals, the ticking of the seasonal clock as flowers wither and change to seed heads: all of these are now vital elements in a planting scheme.
Plants in some retail outlets have, alas, become less interesting, and subject to the strictures of the mass producers and the marketers. Yet a few exceptional garden centres and specialist nurseries (several have opened in the past few years) have wondrous selections that render plantspeople weak from indecision. Species collected in the wild (under licence) by plant-hunters such as Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones, from Wales, have trickled down to enrich the gardens of plant-lovers. With remote regions of the world now more accessible than ever, and with commerce and research facilitated by the internet, we're probably seeing more diverse plants in the past decade than in any similar time frame in history. Every gardener with an acquisitive streak has a curious-looking Asian Arisaematucked away somewhere, or a humongous, leafy Tetrapanax(two of the must-have genera of the past couple of years).
Since I began writing this column our weather has changed: winters are wetter, summers are drier and the average annual temperature has risen. Spring is earlier, autumn is later and severe frosts are far fewer than before. Nobody will deny that the effects of climate change are potentially disastrous, but they have created conditions in which gardeners may flirt outrageously with some fabulously exotic species. Plants that hadn't a hope of lasting the winter without being swathed in straw, horticultural fleece or bubble wrap now have a good chance of survival. Bananas, echiums, daturas and other species of previously questionable hardiness add a strangely tropical atmosphere to our northern European gardens.
The rise in temperature has brought exotic pests and diseases, too: hideous horse-chestnut scale, covering the trunks of our city trees like flour-bomb explosions; and box blight, a fungal infection that eats away at Buxus sempervirens, the framework plant for formal parterres. New weeds also, such as the aquatic fairy moss ( Azolla filiculoides), have made themselves at home in recent years.
Since I took over guardianship of this column Ireland has lost some fine gardeners: Corona North of Altamont, in Co Carlow, David Robinson of Earlscliffe, on the Howth peninsula, and Cicely Hall of Primrose Hill, in Lucan, to mention just three. But a fresh crop of young, curious gardeners - too many to list here - is growing up nicely.
What fills me with the greatest hope, though, is the revival of the vegetable. More people are growing their own, or expressing an interest in doing so. And all of them want to grow them organically. Imagine that.