Two ‘stout’ gardens in Dublin

On a visit to Dublin this August I discovered two very different gardens, linked by associations to the Guinness dynasty.

The first, Farmleigh House and Gardens, lies on the western perimeter of Europe’s largest enclosed public park, Phoenix Park. The estate was created in the latter half of the C19 by Edward Cecil Guinness, the grandson of the founder of the Guinness Brewery, J. Arthur Guinness. The Irish state bought Farmleigh in 1999 to host official visitors to Ireland, and photographs displayed in its elegant rooms record visits by Barack Obama, Elizabeth II and Justin Trudeau. Before reaching the house and gardens, you walk from the car park along a lane bounded by pastureland occupied by a herd of shiny black Kerry cattle and, in a neighbouring field, four rescue donkeys.

As well as landscaped grounds graced with mature specimen trees and a peaceful lake overlooked by a popular Boathouse Cafe, there is a large walled garden area. Yew hedging acts as a foil to the pale palette of a double herbaceous border, where the whites of lilies and Acanthus mollis, Bear’s Breeches, are accented by orange day lilies, Hemerocallis, and the giant thistle-like heads of mauve Cardoons, Cynara cardunculus. The garden glasshouse is in need of restoration but the surrounding cutting garden is neatly arranged into plots demarcated with wooden shuttering, one section of which housed a glorious display of Echinacea purpurea.

Another Dublin garden owes its origins to Ireland’s most famous beverage. The Landscape architect Ninian Niven was commissioned by Benjamin Lee Guinness in the 1860s to create Iveagh Gardens for his nearby townhouse. They were gifted to the Irish state by a subsequent Lord Iveagh. The peaceful public park is situated to the south of the more well known St. Stephen’s Green, where memories of the struggle for Irish independence during the Easter Rising of 1916 contrast with its formal Victorian flower beds, fountains and bandstands. Iveagh Gardens are so secluded as to be almost secret. I found a modest entrance on Earlsfort Terrace, to the side of the National Concert Hall, in an area housing international law firms and financial institutions. The Gardens’ long rectangular footprint is surrounded by mature trees, masking the multi-storeyed buildings nearby. An avenue of standard hollies links a rose garden, The Rosarium, and yew maze to a sunken lawn which was Ireland’s first purpose-built archery ground. The recent drought had stilled the water features to either side of this avenue. The Rustic Water Cascade is spectacular, its high rocky outcrop reflected in a pool at is feet, framed by clifflets in the crevices of which numerous fern species thrive. These include several large Tree Ferns, Dicksonia antarctica, their geometrically arranged fronds mirrored in the water below. Twin circular pools in a lawned area feature elegant female figures in Art Nouveau style, atop rocky plinths. Each lady bears a large dish from which water spills in damper times. I had noted earlier, in a service area in St. Stephen’s Green, a water tanker on which a laminated A4 sheet indicated it contained ‘canal water’, presumably from the nearby Grand Canal. The lawn of the archery field was patchy, its parched areas beginning to re-green following the return of wetter conditions. My exploration of a narrow gravel path along the perimeter of the park led me towards a gateway beside which stands a stout figure, preserved in bronze in the act of singing, arms outstretched and lips parted: Count John McCormack. A plaque celebrates Ireland’s greatest tenor of the C20. His statue is set in a woody glade, with low growing shade loving plants at his feet, including several self-seeded oak saplings.

Next time: an Indian garden in the heart of the Cotswolds.

The author’s garden 7 July 2018

Sweltering temperatures for the past month and scarcely any rain have necessitated frequent watering sessions in my Kew garden assisted by a new acquisition, a very elegant long reach galvanised watering can from Haws, replacing the cracked plastic can I’ve used for years.

Thankfully several specimens in the garden are relatively drought tolerant and there are plenty of flowers on display providing nectar for an assortment of pollinators. Verbena bonariensis flowers, consisting of tiny five petalled florets clustered atop an Angelica like stem, attract both honey and bumble bees. Last summer’s window box lavender plant has settled comfortably into a pot in the sunniest corner of the plot, its grey-green foliage a foil for the sugary pink and orchid shaped petals of the Chinese Foxglove, Rehmannia elata. Nearby, a cerise pink Osteospermum has re-flowered, after I split the original specimen into the three plants of which it was made up when I was given it earlier in the summer. Each individual was enmeshed in the teabag like material which I sometimes feel inhibits vigorous growth of plants sold as annuals. Having dead-headed the spent petals and released the roots I re-planted each plant in pots located in different areas of the garden. Significantly, that in the sunniest spot has been the first to re-flower.

A tomato plant in this corner of the garden is the epitome of strength and vigour and I hope to avoid the blight which saw off last summer’s plants in an overnight collapse. I’ve enjoyed monitoring the success of three plants bought from a plant sale at Osterley House a year ago, all propagated on site from stock plants. Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ has been a star performer. Tucked into a shady spot near the kitchen window, its blooms emerge as bright green pom-poms, fading as they increase in girth to a soft cream, until reaching the size of a football. The weight of the flowers means staking the stems but this is a small price to pay for a display which lifts my spirits each time I look out at the garden. Phygelius capensis was a discovery and thrives in the dappled sunshine provided by the Pieris planted in a corner of the patio. One of its common names is Cape Fuchsia and the 3cm orange trumpet shaped flowers certainly resemble those of Fuchsia ‘Thalia’. The tips of the petal openings are bright scarlet, visible only when tilted upwards for closer inspection. Like Annabelle, it’s a thirsty plant and a challenge during the current dry spell. Less susceptible to a scarcity of water is another pot-planted purchase from Osterley, Stipa tenuissima, whose fine curled tips create a golden haze of filaments which shimmer in the sunshine.

Having removed a yellow flowered Day Lily, Hemerocallis, from the pot in which it had languished without flowering for a couple of years, I have replaced it with perennials identified in the July edition of the RHS’s The Garden magazine as attractive to pollinators. Two are members of the daisy family: Echinacea purpurea ‘Magnus’ and Erigeron karvinskianus. The third, Eryngium planum ‘Blue Hobbit’, is a distant relative of the carrot and having read that the genus dislikes being crowded by other plants, I’ve now put it into a separate pot. This is a relatively dwarf cultivar, due to reach a height of 30cm.

Next time, I discover a hidden park in the centre of Dublin.

Lawn restoration at Osterley and a horticultural ghost

Volunteering in the gardens at Osterley House, the National Trust property a few miles from Heathrow Airport, is a special experience. Today was a day of autumn sun, long shadows and little wind. To see my Friday team colleagues clustered under a tree in the further reaches of Mrs Child’s flower garden, preparing an area for re-turfing, evoked a timeless scene. As I approached them from the work yard with a replenished barrow of soil, I might have been seeing Osterley gardeners from several centuries earlier. Silhouetted against the autumn sunshine, working with tools little changed over time, mattocks, shovels and landscape rakes, I had a strong sense of time suspended.

Today was devoted to lawn repair, with the morning occupied with removing ivy from a bed previously occupied by rhododendrons, where the stumps have recently been ground down. Having ripped the ivy stems from the soil, we raked level the area to be seeded, using wide wooden landscape rakes. We broadcast the grass seed generously across the plot and marked off the sowing area with rope, slung between shepherd’s crooks.

In the afternoon we moved into the sunny area mentioned above and created a neat rectangular plot where again roots and stumps had been ground out. We dug out the spent soil and sawdust to a depth of three or four inches and introduced more soil which we levelled in preparation for the turves. These had been dug from elsewhere in the garden some weeks ago and were stacked in the area occupied by the glasshouse, cold frames and nursery beds. After placing them carefully in a long low barrow, grass facing grass, we trundled the precious cargo around the Tudor Walled Garden to the denuded patch, where we placed the turves in a neat patchwork within the rectangle. The yellowing blades of grass in some of the turf pieces should green up satisfactorily, once exposed to the sunlight from which they have been shielded whilst in their temporary location.

At home in Kew the two pots of Ceratostigma willmottianum plunged into the blue glazed pots in the front garden, have transformed in the last several weeks from their intense blue flowered prime, into bonfire hued red and gold. I knew the species epithet ‘willmottianum‘ to refer to a horticultural personality whose name features in some species and common names, Ellen Willmott. Earlier this week, when reading about Miss Willmott’s early life, I discovered that she was brought up near Osterley in the area of north west Isleworth known as Spring Grove, and attended Gumley House School. So after leaving Osterley, I took a detour by bike to see the area where she lived before her wealthy solicitor father moved the family to Warley Place near Brentwood, Essex. Spring Grove is an area of substantial Victorian properties and the Willmott family home at 52 Spring Grove is described as a three storey double fronted suburban villa with its own coach house and private three quarter acre formal garden.

Wouldn’t it be intriguing to know if the protagonist of the ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’* legend visited the garden at Osterley House as a child and whether it contributed to her lifelong passion for plants and horticulture? What is likely is that she would have been taken to Kew Gardens given the proximity of what was once known as Spring Grove & Isleworth railway station (now Isleworth Station) on the Barnes to Feltham railway loop line, three stations from Kew Bridge Station.

*’Miss Willmott’s Ghost’ is Eryngium giganteum, a short lived perennial up to one metre tall with spiny silvery grey bracts, the seeds of which Miss Willmott is said to have surreptitiously scattered in gardens she visited.

Germination

Since mid winter is traditionally a period for armchair gardening, I have taken the opportunity during a quieter season to launch this site. I hinted in my first post at an interest in grammatical matters which arises in part from a previous career in the legal profession, where accurate written expression is key. A subsequent eight year sojourn in Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew’s visitor information team neatly bridged a transition from law to horticulture.

Whilst much of my time was spent addressing customer relations matters, I took the opportunity of working in the world’s best known botanic garden to develop and expand my interest in gardening, conservation and the natural world. The generous co-operation of colleagues across the organisation, from the horticulture and science teams alike, meant that few days passed without learning about a new plant, conservation initiative or gardening technique.

During my last couple of years at Kew, and through a combination of distance learning and attendance at Capel Manor’s branches at Gunnersbury and Regent’s Park, I acquired the RHS Level 2 Diploma in the Principles and Practices of Horticulture. So as to reinforce what I learnt on the course, for the past year I have volunteered on Fridays in the historic gardens at the National Trust’s Osterley House. This experience has been a source of inspiration for much of what I would like to share in these posts.

As well as writing about gardening, I am planning to develop a ‘light’ gardening business, and hope to be able to document its progress in these virtual pages. Whilst I shall not be operating a hard landscaping or design business, I shall provide a service for busy working clients or those for whom gardening has become more difficult with the passing years. I can clear small town gardens of weeds, prune shrubs and design and maintain planting schemes for containers and individual flower beds.

In the next post I report upon an early November day at Osterley and trace the West London origins of ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’.

From words to weeds

Punctuation and horticulture might not appear to be obvious bedfellows, but when ruminating on an identity for this blog and a fledgling gardening business, I plundered the title of Lynne Truss’s entertaining book, ‘Eats Shoots and Leaves’. Rather than skewering modern grammar, I aim to share some thoughts and observations on gardens, gardening and gardeners.

Pedantry and punctuation have led me to ‘Weeds Roots & Leaves’, though the inclusion or otherwise of commas remains debatable. In the punchline of the joke which inspired Ms Truss’s book title, the inclusion of a comma changes the sense of the phrase entirely, as it would in mine, though to less comic effect.

My original working title, ‘The Pedantic Gardener’, scored poorly when suggested to friends, although I enjoyed creating the proposed copy: ‘If your flower beds are punctuated with weeds and your shrubs need editing, you need the Pedantic Gardener. I can help you compose an elegant garden…’ and so on in similarly pun-laden prose.

I rejected the draft tagline ‘Tall tales from a small garden’ on the grounds it was a little prosaic, in favour of ‘Small tales from a tall gardener’ so as to reflect the modest nature of the blog content and the height of the author.

In my next post I shall explain how I came to write this blog and my purpose in doing so.