Last year a group of garden professionals got together to form the Garden and Landscape Designers' Association. To mark the birth of the organisation they hosted a seminar, at which a number of international garden gurus performed enthrallingly.
It was a truly stimulating affair with every one of the 250 seats in the UCD lecture hall (and much of the floor space too) filled with people from all walks of gardening life: designers, landscapers, nursery people, plantspeople and keen amateurs. By the time I got home I was so fired with enthusiasm that I wanted to replant my entire garden in waves of swaying perennials and rustling grasses after the prairie-inspired style of Michigan-born James van Sweden, and to design my own paving slabs and drain-covers in imitation of the multi-talented and highly-disciplined Danish designer, Preben Jakobsen.
This year the GLDA is putting on another seminar on February 14th, "Constructive ideas for new century gardens". And no doubt, by the end of the day, inspired by Californian "land coach" Topher Delaney, I'll be planning to replace my up-and-coming beech hedge with something less hardedged: she favours the soft and cloudy, blue-flowered bog sage, Salvia uliginosa - but that's probably not reliably hardy in our climate. Or maybe I'll be bulkordering bold, architectural plants in homage to another of the speakers, Anthony Paul, one of Britain's foremost landscape designers.
This man's ideas are particularly appealing in this age of working hand-in-hand with Mother Nature. Unlike some garden designers who can reach fulfilment only by carving up the land to create their own ordered piece of the earth, Anthony Paul is acutely aware of the intense energy of the natural world. Growing up in New Zealand - a land of powerful mountains, lakes and rivers and abundant vegetation - taught him that "Nature is the most perfect gardener." He describes his time in that country as "most important in educating me about plants and the landscape. If you look at Nature, you see the most beautiful picture of harmony between diverse elements - you see how sky, water and plants blend together."
Anthony Paul's designs not only respect the powerful harmonies and rhythms of nature, they also seek to put us human beings in the best possible position to appreciate them, whether it is by merging a garden with a majestic mountainscape or by surrounding a simple decking patio with a naturalistic jungle of lush plants. And of course, the garden, as well as a place to enjoy nature at first hand ("rather than at a picturesque distance"), is a graceful extension of the house: a place to "eat, entertain, relax, swim, sunbathe". It is also place of drama and style - with sculpture, pots, containers and trompe l'oeil set off by exquisite lighting. It is a carefully and elaborately concocted "mix of nature and art direction". All of which could leave you feeling rather weary after an overdose of garden style, except that Anthony Paul marries all these elements together with the most gorgeous array of plants. "I particularly love all the bold, big-leaf plants," he said on the phone, from his cottage at Ockley on the Surrey-Suffolk border. "The ligularias are one of my favourite ranges of plants. They leaf up very early in the spring, they have beautiful shapes and forms - and they're as tough as old boots because they come from China and places like that." Moisture-loving ligularias are put to good use around Anthony Paul's pools - along with other show-off plants such as hostas, foxgloves, meadowsweet, reeds and ornamental grasses like Miscanthus sinensis. In all his designs the plants are placed in such a way that their impact is heightened, and so that they elegantly unite house and garden: "I arrange them in a dramatic and in teresting way, rather than as a collection of plants that look as if someone had just dropped them there with no consideration for the way they look."
And absolutely essential to all of Anthony Paul's gardens are handsome, frondy ferns: "They are almost my most favourite plants. I think a garden without ferns is like a woman without jewels. It's like the finishing touch to a piece of fashion." Also speaking at the seminar will be Topher Delaney, mentioned earlier, whose imaginative solution for dealing with an exposed roof garden was to fill it with brightly coloured aviation wind-socks; exuberant Dutchman Romke van de Kaa, nursery-man, plantsman, writer and broadcaster; and our own John Anderson, of gorgeous Mount Usher gardens. So if you're able to go, don't forget to wear your jewels.