GARDENING Trying to tame an Irish acre

BENDING TO THEIR OWN WILL Bluebells may not always behave as they should.

Our gardening learning curve


Venetia McEllin

Thankfully, I suppose, we didn’t buy a beautifully manicured garden, with moss-free lawn, herbaceous borders, happy shrubs and well fed trees. All we got 30 years ago with our thatched ruin, was an Irish acre with an outstanding view.
Blinded by whitewash, the nostalgia of thatch, blue painted windows and doors (hiding armies of woodworm) and aforementioned view, we fell in love with our home and bought it with much optimism and a totally unrealistic estimate of the time it would take to renovate. I reckoned two months for planning, two for building and two for landscaping. Five years later our three-year-old daughter, Ruth, was still happily sitting on a large pile of builders’ sand outside the back door.
So what of our garden? Early on I planted Clematis montana against the front wall of our house, and watched my climbers lovingly, as they tangled, twined and pushed out young leaves. And what excitement when the buds arrived! I can still remember, there were 24 buds, flushing pink - I would go and examine them each morning like an old pro – until the morning when Ruth came into the house triumphantly bearing a beaker. ‘Mummy, I’ve bought you some flowers’ … and there were the 24 buds….
With regard to the lawn, we optimistically felt that SeΡn could handle corners with his father’s scythe and with enough mowing (we had an old manual mower with rollers at the back) we could soon knock the grass into a respectable imitation of the real thing. Anyway, I was quite fond of daisies and didn’t want to get rid of them - the docks and dandelions were another thing. I did everything possible to get rid of the docks, bar going to a seventh son. And the dandelions had the endearing habit of siting themselves close to walls, which meant that their roots were/are firmly out of reach.
But we persevered with our grass, and managed to develop a new species, which needed no cutting at all – moss! Having tried to get rid of it in all the time-honoured ways, we now embrace its presence. What else can you do?
Our flower-bed period was prompted I’m sure by an old jigsaw of an English country cottage, smothered in creepers and old-fashioned annuals. I never really achieved the look and made yearly errors such as digging up anemones mistakenly believing them to be creeping buttercup and being unable to remember where anything was planted – I defy anyone to be able to read planting labels in the spring! Consequently, I either erred on the side of caution and had a proliferation of weeds in May, or weeded madly, admiring the brown earth, and ended up with, well, brown earth.
We are now more mature gardeners and more philosophical about the whole process. Blue bells continue to come up in our gravelled driveway although they were never planted there, and I half-heartedly try and move them every year. The foxgloves lovingly culled from a cousin’s farm in Cornamona and planted at the entrance to our driveway, have never flowered there, but insist on living on the other side of the wall for the benefit of passing cows and tractors.
We have now added to the sycamore, plum trees and indigenous ash at the back of the house by planting more native trees – I intend to make a little woodland, with a path winding down to our glorious view and a copse of downy birch, carpeted each spring with a mass of bluebells. But I bet you that the bluebells will not take, and will instead, as they have always done, come up in the middle of our drive.

Venetia McEllin is a member of Ballinrobe Garden Club, which meets on the first Tuesday of the month at 7.30pm in Tacú Family Resource Centre, Ballinrobe. The club’s last meeting before the summer break will be held on June 5. New members – beginners and experts – are welcome.