Come into the Garden

As you are on a virtual tour we can start in the walled garden. My brother started by restoring the walls which had become overgrown with ivy and overhanging boughs. Then he set to work on the garden – a jungle where he kept his release pens.

Please don’t say you don’t know what release pens are; keep it bottled-up and read this. I have to say the Barmeath release pens are on a more modest scale. Some pictures I took a few years ago give some idea of how the walled garden looks today.

The little summer house is an imaginative eye-catcher invented by my brother. When this project was complete many a gardener would rest on their trowel but my brother turned his attention to the Wild Garden.

He restored the archery range, created a laurel lawn and planted a beech maze. A laurel lawn is peculiarly well suited to Ireland as they grow well in the damp climate. Jim Reynolds, another great Irish gardener, perhaps eclipsing my brother, had this to say about them.

“The laurel lawn is not often met with nowadays. A feature of Victorian gardens, it survives in a few places, perhaps the most notable being at Fernhill in south Co Dublin. As a means of covering ground in a simple and bold gesture it is stylish and effective under a canopy of deciduous trees. Strictly speaking it is not so much a lawn as a table with the evergreen shrubs trimmed in a flat plane about three feet high so that they merge and form a flat green sea below eye level. Then the eye drifts over the scene calmly noting the trunks of trees rising from the elevated carpet enjoying the cool, and the green light filtered through the leafy canopy high overhead.

For the classic laurel lawn to work well, space is a requirement; three laurels clipped under a small beech tree will not give the desired result and atmosphere. But where ground is available this can be a relatively easy and low maintenance option. Once the laurels are established weed growth will be suppressed by lack of light and an annual clipping will keep the lawn at the desired height.“ (Irish Times, 1996)

Gunnera also does well in the moist, temperate Irish climate. It looks like giant, exotic rhubarb and makes a striking impression when planted on a large scale; even more so with a backdrop of rhododendrons.

The hump-backed bridge is both older and sturdier than Hammersmith Bridge. The “lake” and its islands are artificial, created from a stream. In my childhood it was home to golden orfe and tench, ducks, moorhens, coots and swans. Less popular visitors were predators: herons and otters. But I talk too much …