It is that time of year again, when garden lovers and fans of Irish food, drink and horticulture make a beeline for Dublin's Phoenix Park as the annual Bord Bia Bloom festival begins.
Beginning 18 years ago, when the festival was originally created to promote plants, garden design and gardening, it has now grown into a five-day event that attracts 100,000 visitors.
Every year Bloom, which takes place on a 70-acre site that surrounds the Victorian Walled Gardens, has at its heart both large and small show gardens, that are carefully designed and installed on the site over several weeks and months.
This year, there are 35 gardens created around various themes, including the Coming Home to Nature Garden that demonstrates how sustainability can be incorporated into housing developments through rain water capture, trees, shrubs and wildflowers.
Another garden, based on Ireland's 6,000-year history of farming and dairying, features multispecies grassland, displays of nutrient rich soil and hedgerows that commonly surround Irish fields.
Some gardens have social themes such as the Tusla Fostering Garden, entitled "Together We Grow".
It celebrates foster parents and the children that bloomed under their care.
President Michael D Higgins officially opened the Bloom festival today. In his speech he said the effects of climate change made life very difficult for potato growers and horticulture generally in Ireland. He also said there are less than 100 commercial vegetable growers in Ireland.
President Higgins returned to a theme he raised last year on the cheap selling of produce by supermarkets.
"How wrong it is to have loss leader selling and asking people to produce products for less than the cost of production".
He said he will further discuss the idea of food security with a world expert soon in the context of the market driving policy and principles.
President Higgins said problems begin in the world where there is hunger, and then people have to travel for food and when the food has dried up and there is drought, they move and run into conflict and then leave their country. That is the background to migration he said.
The president said humanity is about helping ecological matters and countries speaking together about the health and future of the planet and its people, rather than saying we must frighten each other so we forever produce "profits for the industrial military complex".
The festival runs from 9am to 6pm each day until bank holiday Monday 3 June.
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Attendees will be able to visit over 15 environmental and conservationist groups in the conservation area, 18 Irish nurseries exhibiting Irish plants.
There will also be 100 food and drink companies across the Food Village and Bloom Inn, and almost 200 live cookery demonstrations and talks, musical performances and family friendly activities alongside shopping opportunities in the Retail Pavilion, the Plant Emporium and the Nursery Village.
Bord Bia estimates the annual on site spend at Bloom exceeds €9 million, adding that many retailers get substantial orders for future business at the event.
Much of that business will be generated at the Bloom Trade Breakfast, taking place tomorrow morning.
This will involve 250 retail and food service buyers meeting on site food and drink companies, and sampling their products with a view to possibly entering supply agreements.
CEO of Bord Bia Jim O' Toole said: "For the 100 plus food and drink companies exhibiting at this year's festival, the Bloom Trade Breakfast provides them with a much-anticipated opportunity for face-to-face engagement with decision-makers in Ireland’s leading retail and foodservice businesses".
He said the event "has a proven track record of delivering commercial business for our exhibitors and it is encouraging to see the event grow from strength to strength".
Good weather is forecast for the coming days and the festival is expected to attract a bumper crowd from around the country.
Tickets for entry cost €30 per adult and each adult ticket purchased allows two children 12 and under to enter for free.
Tickets and information about travelling to the event are available on the Bord Bia Bloom 2024 website.
Weather, pandemic and climate change
Nurseries at Bloom have said that the weather, the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change have all had an impact on the plants they grow and sell over the years.
Bloom hosts nurseries from all over the country showcasing specialist plants.
Denise Rocks of Little Green Growers grows mainly edible plants and flowers which are all organic.
She began trading in 2018 but noticed a big difference in what people were buying once the pandemic occurred.
"Everyone was growing their own [plants] during lockdown," she said.
"What we're seeing now is people are a little more time constrained," she added.
Ireland's spring was particularly wet this year and while Ms Rocks said this did impact on what they could produce, her customers understood.
She said: "What we find is the plants grow a little more slowly and edible flowers are blooming a little bit later.
"It's just a little trickier to manage but we're really used to handling the Irish weather."
Ms Rocks said that she has noticed huge variability in the weather year-on-year.
"We're seeing weather extremes of temperatures, an extreme storm coming through can break the plants," she said.
"In the summer it's much hotter than it used to be," she added.
Little Green Growers has "noticed plants blooming earlier certain years and then missing the pollinators because it's too early for them or too late for them".
She described this as "a real shame".
Billy Alexander, of Kells Bay Garden in Cahersiveen, Co Kerry, grows mostly tree ferns and exotic plants.
"I think the general gardener is far more curious about different plants now," he said.
He has been running his gardening business since the 1990s.
Mr Alexander said he is lucky that the changing climate has not changed what he can grow too much.
"We're very fortunate. A lot of Britain would be too cold for a lot of the plants that I would sell," he said.
"At the moment, we're getting an awful lot of rain, we're getting more storms," he added.
Mr Alexander said that for his business "growing plants in the winter, the thing is not to have the extreme cold".
For others, however, the rain had a big impact but a positive one.
Oliver Schurmann runs Mount Venus Nurseries with his wife, and as they specialise in woodland plants, a wetter season has actually extended the shelf-life of some of their plants.
"Woodland ephemerals actually only flower for a very short time in the woodlands, when the leaf canopy hasn't closed over," Mr Schurmann said.
The wet spring was "like a slow, extended spring," he added.
He said Mount Venus Nurseries "actually got a very long bench time out of a lot of these beautiful woodland plants".
"We just had to hang on and wait until somebody buys it," he said.
According to Aileen Muldoon Byrne of the Boyne Garden Centre and Nursery in Slane, Co Meath, the real winners of last winter and spring were the slugs and snails.
"There were a lot of losses," Ms Muldoon Byrne said.
She said the weather "changed some of the plants we could grow for Bloom".
Ms Muldoon Byrne, who does not use unnatural chemicals in her nursery, has been taking part in Bloom for at least 14 years and has been running a nursery for 25 years.
She said that she has noticed Ireland's climate change in that time but added that gardeners like her had to adapt.
"We just have to manage these things and learn how to cope with them," she said.
What is happening in Gaza is 'unconscionable' - President Higgins
President Michael D Higgins has said that recognising the State of Palestine is a "positive development".
Speaking to reporters at Bloom he said people have talked of recognising a State of Palestine since 1988.
President Higgins said he has been involved in the Palestinian issue for 40 years and that no one justifies the attack carried out on women and children and at the music festival last October and he has said that in 17 speeches.
The president said that many Israelis wanted peaceful coexistence but if that is going to happen, there cannot be a situation where someone says "we have the uncritical support of the largest power in the world so we can do what we like".
He said what is happening in Gaza is unconscionable and the EU damaged itself by not being able to speak strongly, morally and ethically and in accordance with international law.
He also asked how countries who say they are friends of Israel can stay silent as "Israel disgraces itself in front of the world" by continuing action against people.
Additional reporting Eithne Dodd
