A long post about the long weekend. Beauty Care

Since my subtle like a brick wall wrapped in barbed wire browsing of the Aer Lingus website and talk about Going Somewhere last week was trumped by the arrival of Himself's shiny new bicycle on Friday, I was all set for multiple "we never do anything" whinges over the long weekend.

I didn't get to utter the phrase once. (Hmph.)

Courtesy of some inspired spontaneity from Himself, we ended up in Kilkenny on Saturday evening and got in some comedy gigs at the Cat Laughs festival after a gorgeous dinner in Zuni. It was such a good night that we actually went back down for a couple more shows on Sunday.

Yesterday morning, we headed for a cycle. Now, I haven't been on a moving non-gym bike in about 18 months, and while it's true that you never forget how to ride a bike, you can be very bloody wobbly while pedalling and staying upright and wondering if you'll be able to take your hands off the handlebars for hand signals (polite "I-intend-to-turn-right" ones, of course) and only remembering that you should be using the gears when you can't get the pedals to feckin' move as you attempt to ascend a humpback bridge.

Yesterday afternoon, we took ourselves and Dad off to Bloom for the final couple of hours of the show. It was really, really, really wet, which I hadn't been anticipating or I'd totally have broken out the (pink) festival wellies rather than these lads...

Low vamp + canvas + rain = wet feets

As usual, my favourite show garden was from Doylescapes...

More details on Doylescapes' gold medal winning G&T garden here.

The duck garden that won RTÉ's Super Garden show was there too...

 ... complete with a few ducks who looked like they were plotting their escape.

I also liked Anne Hamilton's Islands, large raised undulating beds surrounded by narrow channels of water so that they seemed to float, which were connected by a curving wooden walkway...

... and Niall Maxwell's Victus Ortus, although I'm not entirely sure what the cream slatted concrete/render yoke on the ground (bottom right in this photo) was about...

Hostas seem to be back in fashion in a big way and featured in loads of the show gardens, and once again there were lots of ferns about this year.

Hostas are lovely plants alright. Well, until slugs and snails discover you've planted them, call up all their mates, and descend en masse to gorge themselves on the leaves. (I overheard one woman at Bloom tell another that she'd heard hostas were great for keeping slugs and snails away. Er, not unless your garden's in opposite land, missus.)

Water feature in Dawn Crawford's Urban Oasis

 I think these are peony roses..? Lovely anyways.

The quality of the photos is a bit hit and miss because even though I remembered to charge the camera battery I forgot the memory card - genius - so had to rely on the iPhone.

(True story. I am not just trying to slip a reference to it into every post.)