For me, there was never a second's doubt as to what was the main event at the recent Anglo Irish Bank Dublin Flower Show. It was the presence of Bob Flowerdew. For many years, and before it was chic or politically correct, he has been steadily hoeing his organic row - on television, on BBC Radio Four's Gardeners' Question Time, in books and in magazines. And in his three-quarter-acre plot in Norfolk, in an area that has been inhabited by Flowerdews since the 15th century. (The name, incidentally, is from the Flemish or possibly Huguenot, Fleur de Dieu or Flower of God - little flax flowers probably.) His father was a farmer: "We were pretty poor. The house was medieval, the rooms were draughty and cold, no central heating, no electricity, no water."
Our afternoon's conversation -ranges from gardening to politics, to housing densities, to the unscientific methods of GMO scientists, to the Indian spiritual leader Meha Babe - and to Sergeant Bilko. All these subjects have a relevance to building a better world. Bilko, in case you wondered, is germane because he never harms others, uses his brain, and gets his way through "wit and cunning" rather than brute force.
Like Bilko, Flowerdew employs wit and cunning - in the garden. "We talk about not fighting nature, but what about getting nature to do the work? Nature is out there, there are all these systems, all we have to do is learn to get them to work for us." For instance, "I have the devil's coach horses and the ground beetles controlling slugs for me. They don't know they're doing it, they're just living in a niche that I have provided," - a foot-wide strip of rough grass and spring bulbs at the base of hedges. "It doesn't look unsightly. Well, some people would think so - but that's their problem."
More cunning is exercised in getting ladybirds and hoverflies to eat up aphids, not just by providing them with suitable plants on which to feed at various stages of their life cycles, but by putting up nest boxes where they can over winter. Toads and frogs are also supplied with nest boxes as, of course, are birds. One extra family of blue tits will not only eat thousands of aphids, but it will also enrich the soil with egg-shells and feathers - and droppings: "About 14 grammes a day. That's an ounce every other day. That's nearly a quarter pound a week, a pound a month. Twelve pounds a year of the equivalent of blood, fish and bonemeal spread in your garden for free!"
Meanwhile, grey squirrels - "everyone agrees they're just rats with tails, they steal all my nuts" - are being hoodwinked into depositing their stolen nuts into purpose-built boxes (still under development) so that in time "they will be putting the nuts in the boxes for me, and I can just collect them up." Even aphids play a part, other than being snack-food for birds and predatory insects. Their droppings encourage the activity of beneficial fungi in the soil, while their cast skins and dead bodies are "full of chitin, making plants grow stronger and more resistant to disease."
Instead of "killing things and making holes in the system", organic gardeners are "allowing things to be there and encouraging something else that eats them." Not mincing his words, Flowerdew communicates one of his basic principles of gardening: "This is how I see that it works. We make the fertility increase by having all these chains of life killing each other and shitting all over the place." It may be brutal, but it's certainly not chaotic, at least not in the 40 highly-organised, carefully-mulched, raised beds that make up Bob Flowerdew's vegetable garden. "I keep notes. Every bed has a card and there is a card for each year. I can look back and tell you every single thing that has been on any square foot, on any of those beds, for the last 15 years."
This is not just vegetable train-spotting, but part of ongoing investigations into the effects of different plants on each other, both as elements in crop rotation and as partners in the beds. Different vegetable varieties are also compared ("I try 20 different potatoes every year - I'm always looking for the best chip.") and numerous techniques of cultivating them ("I've gone over to autumn planting of potatoes because spring is such a rush."). All is logged and analysed, and that which proves useful is put into practice in following years, if appropriate. It's an orderly approach that springs from Flowerdew's studies at university: he qualified with an honours degree in financial management and cost accountancy. His methods, he claims, are simply "systems analysis."
Being a gardener, he says, means that "you have to work with the real world. Nobody should be a politician who hasn't been a gardener for a few years." There's no point, for instance, "in saying to your plants, `Look, it's the spring of the economy, now you must grow!' They don't respond. It's no good making all these noises," he emphasises. "You actually have to do something."
Bob Flowerdew's Complete Fruit Book (£12.99 in the UK), Complete Book of Companion Gardening (£14.99 in the UK) and Organic Bible (£19.99 in the UK) are all published by Kyle Cathie.
Jane Powers can be contacted at: jpowers@irish-times.ie