The Mallow Garden Festival will open on Thursday, despite last year's brave entry to the world of garden shows winding up with a loss of £300,000.
This year the show is being put on by Pointsettia Road Ltd, a company formed by a Ballyvourney guest-house proprietor, Ms Nora Lucey. She was one of the guarantors to the banks who made the inaugural festival possible and has now taken on board the sole responsibility for the show. She has assembled a new team to run the event.
Ms Lucey's hope is that the festival will be a financial success, that other shows will follow and that in due course all the creditors will be paid. "The intention is to clear the losses from last year, and the best way to do that is to try to achieve financial success with future shows. This year's show looks very promising, and I believe it will be a success," she said.
Last year 60,000 people visited the festival and this year the number of visitors over the four days is expected to top 70,000. This being the millennium festival, the organisers are making an even greater effort to put Mallow on the map as a must on the gardening calendar.
A great attraction at the event last year was the creation of 16 permanent gardens depicting various themes. One was a recreation of Gallarus Oratory set in Liscannor stone and approached by a stone bridge over a moat. Cascading water, scenes from the Brendan voyage and a sheela-nagig, combined to give it a distinctive Kerry flavour.
The Secret Garden, the Dutch Garden, the medieval Earl of Desmond Garden, the Wood Garden, the Native Irish Garden and the Feng Shui Garden with flavours of the Orient were also among the exhibits.
One year on careful attention to planting and soil composition has evidently paid off, and there has been a remarkable maturing of the gardens in the intervening 12 months.
The festival takes place at the Cork Racecourse in Mallow, a perfect venue for an event this size. There is ample parking and readymade facilities for the craft village which will host 50 stands, double last year's figure.
There will be 10 temporary gardens displaying roses, organic fruit and vegetables, stone mulches, water features and other elements. There will be horticultural as well as ecological sections. Plant-hunters are promised that "every conceivable plant under the sun" will be on offer, with rare and unusual species available from specialist nurseries and garden centres.
While there is a serious side to gardening, the festival's horticultural director, Mr Peter Fitzgerald, known to television viewers as the resident gardener on the Open House programme, points out that as a festival with a family flavour, a carnival atmosphere of entertainment will be created for the younger botanists who may weary of all the grave talk of propagation and seed care.