Walled Gardens is the title of Annabel Goff’s memoir about her childhood in the south of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. (Since describing William Waldegrave’s book as a memoir I now find that it is an autobiography: the former is a description of one part of a person’s life, the latter the whole thing, soup to nuts.)
Her book was poignant as it reminded me of my own childhood. The walled garden is about four acres, surrounded by a high red-brick wall. There is a door set into the wall nearest the house and double wooden doors on the far side of the garden wide enough for a tractor. My grandmother made an herbaceous border against one wall when my grandparents moved back to Ireland in 1938 but she found that it was too far from the house. She created the current border beside the house.
The kitchen garden was my mother’s domain. She had a cage for raspberries, a strawberry bed, globe artichokes, gooseberry and black currant bushes, an orchard and all the sort of green vegetables you would expect. On the south wall, protected from frost by a wooden board, were peach trees and two greenhouses. The smaller of the two jutted out at a right angle and was used for growing tomatoes. The larger was built against the wall and had one big nectarine tree. It was attacked by red spiders and had to be frequently sprayed. Likewise the vegetables received a liberal dusting of DDT. It didn’t seem to do us any harm.
In August the nectarines were ripe and I used to make almost daily visits to gorge on them, throwing the stones into a water tank at the far end of the greenhouse. They had white flesh and the juice used to run down my arms. I didn’t like the peaches as much, specially as they attracted a lot of wasps. An early experiment, when I put a stick down a wasps’ nest and poked around, gave me a strong aversion to wasps.
When there was heavy work to be done Butterley was taken off his duties on the farm to assist my mother. One regular task was to clear the path of weeds using a flame thrower. Broad indiscriminate sweeps invariably resulted in substantial collateral damage, one year the gooseberries, the next the black currants.
Outside the kitchen garden is a plot where the dogs are buried with engraved headstones; also an archery alley slightly sunken and surrounded by Irish yews to minimise any wind. All of this was half a century ago and you may wonder what has become of it now. My brother has rescued the alley and the whole garden from dereliction and wilderness. It is back again almost in the state it was in the 1830s when it was created and there were a dozen gardeners to tend it. Here are some recent pictures.
