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It’s garden show season all of a sudden, isn’t it?

I can’t quite believe it this year. We’re still in the middle of our nippy, squally, spring and hey presto it’s time for growers, showers and designers to present their wares, showcase their skills and inspire us all to garden-party-on-down.

Chelsea celebrates it’s centenary this year and already the glossy gardening magazines are full of articles telling the Chelsea story and looking back at past horticultural fads and fashions.

Gardeners' Corner will be joining the throng at the start of the week and we look forward to bringing you some radio snap-shots on next week’s programme.

This weekend though we’re on home turf as the Airtricity Garden Festival takes place in Hillsborough. It has hopped happily over the garden wall this year from it’s previous home in the walled garden at the back of the castle to make it’s new home in the grounds of Hillsborough Castle itself.

With this year’ s festival officially opened by Monty Don there is more than a little horticultural magic in the air.

On the day of our visit show gardens large and small and marquees large and small were looking quite magical and absolutely at home in the lovely rolling landscape. Cherry Trees provided perfect natural awnings and huge Rhododendrons made beautiful backdrops.

There is nothing like the chance to be creative and every year the designers and gardeners rise to the challenge and create gardens to impress and inspire.

I particularly like the gardens created by local schools for their humour and inventiveness, for the fun they have with re-cycling all sorts of handy materials and for the enthusiasm with which teachers and pupils work together. Their theme this year is music, so plenty of scope there.

Painting with Plants is the theme for the Team Challenge gardens, whose raision d’etre is for a group of colleagues to work together to create a garden and it always impresses me how much the teams always achieve in terms of structure and ideas working within a small space.

As we know only too well in this lovely part of the world of ours, the weather is guaranteed to challenge and you have to hand it to the growers and showers who are made of stern stuff when it comes to withstanding all that the elements can bestow.

But rise to the challenge they do and in the beating heart of the festival, the Floral Marquee, you will find plants grown to the peak of perfection which, as far as I’m concerned, are just about impossible to resist.

On this week’s programme too we paid a very welcome return visit to the Community gardens in Grove Park. Established last year by The Friends of Grove, the gardens are lovingly presided over by an enthusiastic group of local people who are absolutely committed to creating a productive community space for young and old where fruit trees and bushes, vegetables and herbs can be cultivated and harvested for the good of all.

Working alongside the community to help with heavy digging and with some of the planting out is gardener Mat Dixon from Belfast City Council and local team from the charity L’Arche.

Vegetable growing classes are also beginning this weekend under the friendly guidance of The Conservation Volunteers.

We wish them all well and look forward to our next visit.