PUBLICATIONS

Issue 43 - Autumn 2007

People will go to any length to eradicate all sense of place from their gardens. Helen Rock talks about how the natural features of a site are often its best asset – including the humble rock.

When working on a big garden by the sea in Connemara a few years ago, one of the locals on our team told us a shocking story, about people from another part of Ireland who had just built a new holiday house in a very famous beauty spot nearby. These people, he said, were in the process of having all the rocks in the landscape around their new holiday house blown to bits with dynamite, for no higher purpose than to clear the way for a suburban-style lawn. I'm not kidding.

Apparently - in the same way that you can chop down trees as you please in Ireland - you can also blow up the natural landscape with impunity. When you are blessed with a piece of paradise, as these rich and ignorant people were, you do not blow it up with dynamite merely to make it look like somewhere else.

Those wonderful big rocks you see everywhere in Connemara and other places in Ireland are an integral part of the landscape, its backbone, its geology, its history and often, if the shape fitted the space available for building, the bulwark against which many an old stone house still leans.

The rocks are also a serious material asset to all those who garden in rugged country and coastal areas, whether working on breathing new life into an old garden, or shaping a new garden out of a place gone wild - or perhaps never tamed. Rocks can be brilliantly sculptural, their shapes rising out of the earth, sometimes like the backs of great amphibian beasts.

Rocks are markers, contour makers and level changers, they are viewing mounds and dry places for sitting. Young trees and flowers that might otherwise falter, find shelter in their lea. They are handsome and amazingly bright when cleaned of smothering brambles and other dominant wild plants; then the rocks can spawn little sedums, roses, rock pinks, thymes and honeysuckles. In their hollows and grooves, water will gather for birds to bathe and for butterflies to dip their wings.

When the coastal regions of the West of Ireland were densely populated before the Great Famine, potatoes were grown amongst the big rocks for shelter, and also because every inch of arable land was used to support the large population. The thin covering of clay in the folds and around the skirts of the rocks were made rich and deep for the potatoes with donkey loads of seaweed, brought up from the sea each April, when the high tides left lavish amounts on the shore, just in time for the first potato sowings.

But not, I was told, that particular year - 2003. And it was obvious to see, all along the shoreline, this new fallout from the latest round of global warming. There were no tides high enough that April, nor May, to deposit these great amounts of seaweed. This lack would have been a big blow not so long ago, when most of the people living a mixed farming and fishing life along the West coast grew their own spuds and lived by a traditional system of almost total barter, where day-to-day money was needed only for tea, sugar and flannel, for making shirts and underclothes.

But now we have na pratai siopa (shop potatoes) instead of na garrai pratai (the potato gardens) and ever increasing numbers of seaside houses that are lived in only part of the time. These all have gardens of varying sizes, old and new, which have to be either resurrected or made from scratch, and then maintained to some kind of acceptable standard. But there are other ways, more exciting than mere manicured lawns, of making and maintaining a decent holiday garden, old or new, in the wilder landscape of this beautiful, ecologically endangered island of ours.

Mowing is fine, though only in dry weather, or you'll be left with brown grass for half a season. But weeding to bowling green standards in Connemara could mean madness, as is the liberal use of weedkiller in such a sensitive, exquisitively balanced landscape. Nowadays, the barely tamed wild look is perfectly respectable, and can be stunningly beautiful for much of the year. This is the way gardeners, landscape architects and designers have to go.

If a garden already exists and has some bone structure - in the form of hedges, paths, trees, shrubs and grass - then really, it just needs some tweaking to look cultivated. Tweaking could be clipping hedges and shaping shrubs into mounds, cones, balls, clouds - whatever organic shape the plant itself dictates - for a strong architectural look. If you mattock out some brambles you'll be delighted by the lovely wild plants which will grow up in their place in just one season.

But one of the quickest ways of making a place look gardened and cared for is to mow a path, or paths, through any long grass. The effect is instant and artless. Just make sure the path leads somewhere, even to a rock for sitting on, or there'll be a sense of anti-climax every time you use it. Cultivate patches of desirable wild flowers - orchids, ramsons, irises, buttercups, violets - by keeping down the obvious thugs in their neighbourhood.

Plant lots of tough, hardy perennials and biennials (columbines, sweet rocket, hellebores, geraniums, white foxgloves, Oriental poppies, acanthus all do well) and bulbs of different kinds, for naturalising. Try hundreds of scented Poet's Narcissus in any light woodland, perhaps a stand of wild cherries, for flowering all through the month of May.

Gardening with nature has great advantages, and is far less work (and less damaging to the environment) than going against it. When a piece of naturally beautiful meadow is past its best, it can be cut for hay or grazed, which will keep certain things from getting too exuberant. Gardening by the sea also has its distinct advantages over inland gardening. There might be relentless winds that scorch and scour if no shelter is provided, but there is no mildew on roses, for example, no hard frosts, few aphids and hardly a slug, as the latter are not at all fond of salt.

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