There's one particular kind of gardening that makes some people's blood boil. And often, faced with an example of this style of planting, the most suave and serene garden professionals begin to foam at the mouth and wave their hands around.
If you haven't guessed yet, I'm talking about bedding plants. Jolly, colour-drenched displays of innocent annuals arranged in bold patterns, brightening our public parks with their unabashed gaiety.
It starts in spring, with regiments of fine, upstanding tulips, scented wallflowers and endearingly floppy pansies. And it goes on all summer and well into autumn with opulent carpets of flaming-orange marigolds, fiery-red salvia, cool-blue ageratum and geraniums in every imaginable tinge of red.
Geometric bedding schemes have been around since early-Victorian days, and one of their first - and most cantankerously vociferous - detractors was the eminent, Irish-born gardener William Robinson. He wasted no opportunity to get the knife in, denouncing them as "pastry-work gardening" and "no more interesting than an oilcloth pattern". He accused "flower gardeners" of "meanly trying to rival the tile or wall-paper men".
Nonetheless, in Robinson's great - and otherwise mould-breaking - volume, The English Flower Garden, he chose to devote a chapter to "summer-bedding gardening", although he didn't deign to write it himself: he left that to one W.W. Heckfield. (And, he couldn't resist putting a snippy footnote at the end of Heckfield's contribution, advising instead the "true way" to plant beds.)
Anti bedding plant sentiment is still alive and flourishing today: at a recent seminar on garden design, a distinguished international practitioner suggested that anyone in the auditorium with pansies at home should go and cut off the flower heads with a scissors. And when it was pointed out that people actually like bedding plants, he suggested that they could be taught not to!
Of course, the irony of the thing is that nowadays bedding displays are seen as being unsophisticated and vulgar - the choice of the great horticultural unwashed, as it were. But when they burst into fashion during the last century, they were seen as a manifestation of the garden owner's wealth. And indeed, only the richest could afford the heated glasshouses and the numerous staff required to keep the beds filled and maintained for many months of the year.
One of the first garden designers to use massed summer bedding was the architect, John Barry, who in the 1830s and 1840s worked on a number of the Duke of Sutherland's properties. His Italianate gardens boasted stately terraces, lavishly furnished with urns, statues and fountains (or "water squirts" as William Robinson mischievously dubbed them), and set alight by solid blocks of thousands of brash annuals.
In Dublin, Victorian St Stephen's Green - which dates from 1880 - has some fine rugs of spring and summer bedding, with the latter keeping the four greenhouses full to the brim for several months. Park superintendent, Margaret Gormley, says that they grow 10,000 plants each year and that even the greenhouse aisles are blocked by trolleys of plants, leaving only 6 inches to squeeze by.
"People love the bedding schemes", she says, and agrees that there would be an outcry if they replanted the beds with something more up-to-date such as swaying perennials or whispering grasses. "No," she stresses, "they love the colour, they like to see them well maintained, and they don't want them to change too much."
And that's the way I feel about my local Victorian park, the People's Park in Dun Laoghaire, where in high summer, the gaudy horticultural fireworks send a happy shimmer down my spine. How can anyone resist the sheer, good-natured, great-to-be-alive exuberance of 100 sunny marigolds all grinning up and saying "Hello! Look at us! Here we are! Boom!"
Bedding plants are not meant to send us into a higher realm of contemplation or bring us closer to nature (nature has little to do with it), they're simply there for pure fun and entertainment. If you're one of those frowning gardeners who is still not convinced, think of it this way: bedding plants are just another facet of the diversity of gardening. And we all know, in this day and age, that every serious gardener is committed to maintaining diversity.
But then again, gardening being subject to the cycles of fashion, you can be pretty sure that in the year 2020 some international designer will be showing his slides at a seminar and saying "Now, here's something really whacky and revolutionary that I did for a client - money no object." And he will zap to a slide of the most radiant tapestry of lobelia, alyssum and salvia - and the audience will gasp at its cleverness. "They're called bedding plants," he'll say proudly, "People really didn't understand their simple beauty in the last century."
Diary date: Tomorrow, 12.30 p.m. to 6 p.m., National Botanic Gardens: Students annual plant sale, Parish Hall (under py- ramidal church), Glasnevin. Rare and unusual plants from the Botanic Gardens, the Dillon garden, Altamont and Birr Castle. Guided tours of Botanic Gardens at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.