Peter Dowdall: 'Long before social media, gardeners swapped plants and advice over fences and gates'
All smiles: Frances and Noel Horgan, Dromahane, with Barkley, at a previous Mallow Home & Garden Festival. Pictures: Eddie O'Hare
By late May, something begins to happen in Irish gardening that you don’t quite get at any other time of year. The garden is no longer an idea, a plan or a promise of what might be. It is happening right now. Lawns need cutting each week, hedges are stretching out in every direction, containers are filling, roses are beginning to move and every garden centre in the country is full of people standing in front of benches of plants wondering what they should buy and what will work in their garden.
This is why events like the Mallow Home & Garden Festival still matter so much.
From May 22 to 24 this year, Cork Racecourse in Mallow will once again become a meeting point for thousands of gardeners from all over Ireland. Officially now in its 27th year, the festival has become one of the best known and most established gardening events in the country and, in many ways, it reflects Irish gardening better than almost any glossy television programme or social media trend ever could.
I will be speaking there on each day of the show again this year, alongside Paraic Horkan and many others, and one of the new features for 2026 is something I think people will particularly enjoy, a live gardening Q&A clinic each day with myself, Paraic and guest experts where people can bring real questions, real problems and real gardening dilemmas.
This, to me, is exactly what gardening in Ireland is actually about, not perfection, not polished photographs, not gardens designed purely to be looked at on a screen, but people trying to figure out why the hedge is turning yellow, what to plant in a windy site, why the lawn is struggling, what survives wet soil, how to create privacy without blocking light, or simply where to begin.
There has been a noticeable shift in gardening over the last few years. For a while, social media pushed gardening towards aesthetics above all else. Perfect borders, perfect gravel lines, perfect patios, carefully filtered Mediterranean-style gardens photographed on the one dry evening of the week as if the gardens were designed almost more for Instagram than for Irish weather.
What I hear now, both online and in person, is something much more practical, people want plants that actually work. They want gardens that fit real life, they want lower maintenance, better structure, more privacy, more pollinators, better soil, less waste and more confidence in their decisions before they spend money and that’s where a show like Mallow comes into its own.
For you see it is here that you will get those answers, expert horticulturists and gardeners are ten a penny in the Mallow show, you will be literally tripping over them. Walk around the festival and you overhear conversations that tell you far more about Irish gardening than any trend forecast ever will.
One person discussing a hedge that failed after two wet winters.
Another looking for plants for deep shade under mature trees. Somebody asking about clay soil. Somebody else trying to create shelter from Atlantic winds.
You hear conversations about lawns destroyed by leatherjackets, about plants that survived the drought two summers ago but then died last winter, about whether it is too late to sow wildflowers or too early to cut back certain shrubs.
These are real gardening conversations and at Mallow, they happen face-to-face.
I think we underestimate how much people still crave that human side of gardening. We spend huge amounts of time looking at gardens through screens, watching short clips, reading conflicting advice, seeing polished images without context, but gardening itself is physical, seasonal and local. It is shaped by weather, soil, exposure and experience.
A person standing beside you looking at a plant saying, “I tried that and it hated my garden,” is sometimes more useful than 20 online articles.
That is where festivals like Mallow still have enormous value as they connect and reconnect people with gardening physically.
This is a show where you will see plants properly rather than through a photograph. You will notice texture, scale and scent, you will speak directly to growers and nursery owners who have spent years producing plants in Irish conditions. You watch people carrying trays of perennials back to their cars with the optimism that is unique to us gardeners.
Bloom, of course, is bigger, more polished, more national in scale. It has become a major national event and rightly so. But Mallow feels different, it feels more tangible, more practical and perhaps more reflective of everyday gardening in Ireland.
In many ways it feels less like “show-garden Ireland” and more like “real-garden Ireland” and that is in no way a criticism, I think it is one of its strengths.
People are not just shopping. They are searching for ideas, reassurance and confidence. They want somebody to say, “Yes, that plant will work there,” or “No, don’t waste your money on that in a windy site.” They want practical guidance that reflects real Irish conditions rather than generic advice copied from somewhere completely different climatically.
That is one of the reasons I particularly like the addition of the new live Q&A clinics this year. Gardening advice works best when it is conversational. One answer often sparks another question. Somebody asks about hydrangeas and suddenly a wider discussion emerges about soil pH, drainage, pruning or exposure. Somebody asks about a struggling hedge and three other people realise they have exactly the same problem.
Gardening has always been social in that sense.
Long before social media existed, gardeners swapped plants, advice, stories and warnings over fences and garden gates. In many ways, festivals like Mallow continue that tradition on a larger scale and perhaps that matters now more than ever.
Because despite all the technology available to us, gardening remains wonderfully real, no app will dig a hole or plant a plant. Every garden is different and every site behaves differently. IN the garden experience, observation and in particular the soil, still matters. Perhaps most importantly of all, people still matter.
All this is why thousands will once again make the journey to Cork Racecourse later this month. Not simply to buy plants or look at show gardens, but to reconnect with gardening itself, to ask questions and gather ideas, to feel inspired once more and to remind themselves that even in a world increasingly lived online, some things are still best experienced properly, outdoors, among plants, with compost on your hands and positive energy in the air.
- Got a question for Peter Dowdall? Email gardenquestions@examiner.ie
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