This year the show's title is "Passport to the World." I can't say I've ever been a great fan, despite exhibiting in the past. Usually there are some interesting lectures, looking at the schedule I've already missed some interesting ones.
I'm on maintenance duty Friday for my garden club entry, but am tempted to go up on Thursday when a couple of lectures catch my eye. Early in the morning representatives from some of my favorite catalogs, Burpee, The Cooks Garden and Heronswood talk about Vegetables Around the World. The Irish Tourism Board seems to be sponsoring daily lectures on Irish Gardens thursday afternoon the head Gardener at Mt Stewart talks about Northern Ireland's Great Gardens.
A couple of years ago the theme of the Flower show was Irish Gardens. Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor gave a lecture which included slides and anecdotes about Mount Stewart, it would be interesting to hear about the garden from the head gardeners point of view.
According to Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor, the formidable Marchioness of Londonderry modeled Mount Stewart after her ancestral home, Dunrobin Castle in Scotland. A great socialite who often greeted her guests wearing an enormous diamond tiara nicknamed the “Londonderry fender”, when she first saw her husband’s home she called it the “darkest, dampest, saddest place I have ever stayed in” and proceeded to redesign and redecorate the interior and the gardens in the most lavish way possible. When her husband succeeded to the Marquessate in 1915 there were plain lawns with decorative pots. She added the Shamrock Garden, the Sunken Garden, increased the size of the lake, added a Spanish Garden with a small hut, the Italian Garden (planned by Gertrude Jekyll but the Marchioness liked only the plans, not the plantings), the Dodo Terrace, Menagerie, the Fountain Pool and laid out walks in the Lily Wood and rest of the estate. It is now considered one of the greatest gardens of Europe, in her words the grounds became “more cheerful and livable but beautiful. After the death of her husband, she gave the gardens to the National Trust in 1957.
Powerscourt was one of the grandest, with a spectacular waterfall and a staircase 40’ wide and a gardens originally designed in the seventeenth century which included a walled garden, fish pond, cascades, grottos and terraces. A century later the 6th Viscount Powerscourt instructed his architect, Daniel Robertson, to draw up new schemes for the gardens.
Robertson was a talented but dissolute, given to drink, always in debt and wheeled around in a wheelbarrow with a large bottle of sherry in one hand. When the sherry was finished he’d collapse in a stupor and work was finished for the day. When sober and slightly sloshed he was one of the leading proponents of Italianate garden design which was influenced by the terraces and formal features of Italian Renaissance villas and perfected in gardens in France and Germany.
His designs and the plans of other landscape experts Robertson designed the terrace nearest the house. He is said to have suffered from gout and directed operations from a wheelbarrow, fortified by a bottle of sherry. When the sherry was finished, work ceased for the day!
The death of the 6th Viscount in 1844 meant that alterations to the gardens ceased until his son resumed the work in the late 1850s. Using a combination of Robertson's designs and the plans of the other landscape experts led to the creation of enormous terraces, incredible pebble set mosaics and tree planting on an enormous scale -- 100 men and carts brought in soil, and planted 400,000 trees a year for 10 years as well as an amazing collection of statuary, ironwork and other decorative items from around the world.
Other gardens mentioned I longed to visit included Ballymaloe House and cooking school with 10,000 boxwood hedges based on Robert Carrier’s garden and the Chateau Villandry. Includes a fabulous shell house which incorporates many of the shells used in the cooking school kitchens.
Altamont, one of the most romantic gardens in Ireland is a Robinsonian blend of formal and informal gardens on an 100 acre estate. There are lawns bisected by sculpted yews sloping down to a romantic lake (dug by 100 men and horses just after the famine) and surrounded by rare trees, rhododendrons, shrubs and a profusion of roses and herbaceous plants.
The garden was planted by the wonderful sounding Feilding Lecky Watson who started collecting rhododendrons in Ceylon when he was invalided there by malaria during World War l. He planted rhododendrons by the thousands and when he and his wife couldn’t decide what to call their youngest daughter he looked out the window and called her Corona after his favorite -- as she said she thanked God he hadn’t been partial to Bagwald Ruby. Corona and her husband lived in the gate house before moving into the great house on her parents death and restored the gardens to their original beauty.
Butterstream was the only garden shown that was built from scratch in the last 20 years by its owner, Jim Reynolds. It was done without the long purse and cheap labor of the other estates and was the one I most wanted to visit - of course it doesn't seem to be open to the public at present.
Here are Jim Reynolds words about it’s conception.:-
“It started innocently enough. There was no grand vision of Arcadia, no hint of an all-absorbing passion, no trumpets sounded in my ear - just the heaving and thud of a piece of clay being double-dug in preparation for the reception of a dozen hybrid tea roses.
This irrational urge to possess a few roses had come quite suddenly. While I had enjoyed helping to plant wallflowers and summer bedding as a child, I had during schooldays been a most reluctant gardener, baulking at the prospect of involvement with anything requiring physical exertion. By my early twenties the prospect of a little light dabbling in the garden seemed attractive enough: pruning, dead-heading and a spot of gentle weeding would not be too demanding, I thought.
I soon became a garden visitor. Mount Stewart, Birr Castle and Ilnacullin - all on a suitable grand scale -were favourite destinations. In Britain, Crathes and Sissinghurst provided inspiration. My horizons began to expand quickly and I realised that even a young chap with nothing more than a dozen roses could learn an immense amount about the principles of design, layout and planting.
These new-found notions and theories would have been of little use had there not been some ground on which to make a garden. I was particularly fortunate in growing up on a farm, so there was some space available for these early horticultural experiments and nobody particularly objected to my enclosing the corner of a field. As I became more ambitious (more foolish, my friends thought), the fence migrated farther and farther out into the field.
From the early 1970s a series of small compartments evolved. The site, being long and narrow, particularly lent itself to division, and as I began to collect plants and to concentrate on matters of design it seemed most reasonable and logical to devote different areas to particular plants or colour schemes.
In the beginning my ventures were greatly enlivened by the frequent visits of stampeding cattle or by browsing horses whose special delight was to pull recently planted shrubs and trees from the ground, chew on them a bit and then discard them. Other rural delights missed by town gardeners were the visits of the rabbits and hares. They shared things very fairly.
Knowing nothing, I naively assumed that I could grow anything that took my fancy: a few camellias, acacias, lots of rhododendrons, an embothrium or two. The possibilities seemed endless, or so the horticultural literature seemed to imply. After all, this is Ireland, we have a mild climate and we are: renowned for our Robinsonian gardens It did not take very long to learn that the Irish midlands are not suited at all to these things: the ungrateful persisted in dying. The soil is a heavy limestone clay and there is generally hard winter frost.
These setbacks did little to disenchant me, but were, I soon realised, a decided advantage and saved me from the dreaded fate of making a rhododendron garden supplemented with conifers and heathers for added boredom. I thoroughly agree with the late Russell Page's summary of most large rhododendron collections as being as artistically interesting as a wallpaper catalogue. Instead I came to the joys of roses old and new - enormous and sprawling like the delicious pink 'Belvedere Rambler' (common in old Irish gardens) or the delectable little Edwardian 'Natalie Nypels' - flowering shrubs and small trees, foliage plants and most importantly of all the unending range and variety of herbaceous perennials. There were choice and tasty pickings to be found in old gardens, particularly m old walled gardens around the country: shrub roses that had long ago lost their names and lots of tantalising herbaceous plants. The candelabra primulas, ‘Lissadel Pink' and ‘Asthore'; the startling alpine thistle, Eryngium alpinium ‘Slieve Donard'; and numerous choice old crocosmias and campanulas are just a few almost forgotten plants which were to be found. As a plant collector it would be so easy to end up with a jumble of horticultural misfits and oddities and no doubt some would find comets here which begin to resemble cabinets of curiosities I try to be rigid on matters of design and of colour, always bearing in mind that a garden should be an aesthetic or even sensual experience with a careful buildup of drama and excitement, interspersed with pauses leading to new expectations and eventually to a suitably timed climax. While each garden room at Butterstream is complete in itself with its own particular mood and planting, the eye is drawn onwards by the sight of a gate, an urn or a pavilion until the final comer is rounded and the grand finale comes into view. This is a small Tuscan temple reflected in a lily pool set in a wide pavement and surrounded by formal lines of box and terracotta pots, providing an evocation of a different world - a villa garden in Pompeii.
After 20 years of five to nine gardening (the best part of the day from nine to five was spent as an archaeologist of sorts), I decided that the garden should begin to keep me. Having worked single- handed for so long it was time to have a little help and this would be paid for by opening to the public, It is rather nice to note that the Good Gardens Guide has been pleased to honour my efforts with their highest accolade, two stars. Some think that my head will never again fit through the door.)
Nature must take much of the credit. Many things have succeeded in spite of me and the overall result has been beyond my expectations. My hope is that visitors will be inspired to be more adventurous and daring in their own gardens. It really is the greatest fun.”
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