At a grassroot level, learning can be so simple.

A simple 30-minute bus ride from the centre of Dublin can transport you to another world, far from the fumes and the maddening crowds of the city. Just hop on the number 65 bus at Eden Quay and it will whisk you past Rathmines, past leafy Rathgar, Terenure and on up into the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains where paradise lies waiting.

A heavily wooded and very special piece of this larger paradise belongs to Jimi Blake, and over the last couple of years he has been marking his six acres - part of the 400 hundred acre family farm at Tinode near Blessington - into a gardening school, ready to receive keen gardeners of every ilk who wants to learn more, or as Blake puts it, "who want to get down and dirty in the garden in 2004."

Having spent the last 10 years as head gardener at Airfield in Dundrum, where - using lots of grasses, stalwart perennials and organic vegetables - he redesigned, restored and extended the old Overend place, Blake is ready to move on. His passion, he says, is hands-on gardening, and teaching others how to do it.

"I'm keeping the courses as practical as possible. Some others, they just have you sit there and you never get out."

During his tenure at Airfield, Blake developed and taught an imaginative series of horticultural courses (which are still running).

"I get a huge thrill from watching people's faces light up when they learn how to do something that has always seemed a mystery to them before," he beams.

A big sheet tunnel, where he grows many of the organic vegetables he'll be serving his students for lunch, will be an outdoor classroom, though he hopes to build a more permanent structure in the future.

Five of Blake's six acres are ancient woodland, fabulously rich in leafmould and underplanted with sheets of bluebells; full of big atmospheric stands of oak, beech, larch, birch, sycamore and a magical old Chamaecy-paris. Planted when Tinode House was built in 1830, it is also the site of much of the original formal gardens, and Blake keeps coming across bits of the original box hedging, which of course he is keeping and restoring.

Blake's place didn't have a name until his sister, June Blake, found the name of the stream that runs through his land on an old Ordnance Survey map. Hunting Brook it was called and Hunting Brook it is once again. (June Blake has just opened a nursery next door, which will feature in some of the classes, but is also open in its own right and well worth a visit.)

The remaining acre is a two-year-old garden of mainly ornamental grasses and herbaceous perennials, some of which snakes around Blake's new dream house. The house, which will be used as another classroom for slide presentations and so on, is an incredibly snug log cabin, with a wood-burning stove and a verandah facing out to the freshness of the larch trees.

"I designed it myself really," he says. "I made rough drawings which the architects then drew up to the right specifications. An Irish company called Woodcraft Homes organised the rest" They had all the wood cut in Poland, then they brought over a skilled crew of Polish workers, who completed the house in seven weeks.

For Blake, all this is a dream come true. He hopes to be able to make a life and a living stretching far, far into the future, teaching and practising the things he is most passionate about. He is madly excited at the thought of developing a real woodland garden, working with the existing framework to enhance it, never spoiling.

Soon, he hopes to plant up the long driveway leading from the main road, using masses of "see-throughs" (a buzz word among designers at the moment) such as Veronicastrum, as well as lots of daisies and plants with spiky profiles.

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