Crocodiles in the water features

LAST MONTH I recommended visiting Mount Stewart in Co Down. I hadn’t been to this remarkable garden in some years, so I decided to take my own advice – and what good advice it was. The 32-hectare patch on the edge of Strangford Lough is just as magical as I had remembered it. It is an inward-looking and self-contained private world. The perimeter is protectively ringed with layers of trees to absorb the salt breeze from the sea, so you can’t see the lough or the outside landscape from anywhere within the garden.

The gardens were largely the creation of Edith, Lady Londonderry, who started to refashion them in 1919. She and her husband, Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry, were well connected and fabulously wealthy. He was a cousin of Winston Churchill, and she was a society hostess of some influence. Mount Stewart was one of their several residences, including country estates in England and Wales, a townhouse in London, and a “hunting box in the Shires”, according to a contemporary report in this paper.

When Lady Londonderry first saw the grey stone Georgian mansion, she was dismayed at how dark and damp it was. Evergreen oaks crowded the building, and other large trees cut out the light and air. When she became its châtelaine, she wasted no time in brightening the mood of the place. The estate took on at least 20 ex-servicemen, demobbed after the second World War, so she was able to effect sweeping changes fast. Over a period of less than 10 years, she oversaw the making of a series of compartmentalised gardens to the south and west of the house.

The offending evergreen oaks were summarily dispatched, and in their stead – but not too close to the building – were planted generous numbers of the Tasmanian blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus). At the time, it was a species more usually employed as a spindly trophy shrub in subtropical bedding schemes. But in the balmy, largely frost-free climate of Mount Stewart, the young trees shot up to the heavens. Rainfall is relatively low here, about 800mm (31 inches) per annum, but the moist sea air promotes heavy dews in warm weather.

Lady Londonderry experimented with many plants of borderline hardiness: tender rhododendrons, cordylines in plenty (including the least hardy C indivisa), the strappy Beschorneria yuccoides and the climbing bell-flowered Lapageria rosea from Chile, and numerous other plants from elsewhere in South America, as well as from California, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. They grew prodigiously, so that within a couple of decades the garden flew into a precocious prime.

But the plants are just one impressive element at Mount Stewart. The garden structure itself is so strong that it could be filled with the world’s most monotonous vegetation, and it would still make you catch your breath. Lady Londonderry’s “Italian Garden” and its adjacent “Dodo Terrace” are mad fantasies: the lines are rigorously formal, with low hedging and walls, and with plenty of well-placed water, urns-on-pedestals and statuary.

But the hedging, instead of the expected green box, is completely unorthodox: deep-red berberis, unnatural-looking hebe and needle-leaved heather. The water features contain crocodiles, the urns sit on the heads of cloven-hooved monkeys, and the statuary – all of it made by local man Thomas Beattie – is made of concrete, and is a series of whimsical animals and mythical beings.

Many of the creatures are depictions of members of the Ark, a political club which Edith had started at her home in London during the first World War. Arthur Balfour was Arthur the Albatross, Churchill was Winnie the Warlock, Lord Londonderry was Charley the Cheetah, while Lady Londonderry had styled herself as Circe the Sorceress. Nowadays, nearly a century after their creation, there is something a little poignant about this immortalising of a long defunct joke.

Lady Londonderry’s fondness for literal depictions extended to her clover-shaped Shamrock Garden, with its harp made from yew topiary, and its Red Hand of Ulster picked out in scarlet begonias (and latterly, tender geraniums). Also by the house are a sunken garden, which is surrounded by a blaze of azaleas in spring; a Spanish Garden, with beautifully trimmed Leylandii arches (showing that it is possible to train this beast of hedge); a lily wood; and the Mairi Garden, named for the youngest of the five children, who was put here in her pram to take the air.

Behind the house, at a few minutes’ distance is a wildfowl-rich lake, and on the far side, “Tir Nan Og”, the family burial ground. The mortal remains of the maker of this extraordinary garden reside here. jpowers@irishtimes.com

Mount Stewart Gardens, Portaferry Road, Newtownards, Co Down, BT22 2AD; nationaltrust.org.uk/mountstewart; 048-42788387

Next Saturday, 2-5pm: open day of Carmel Duignan’s garden at 21 Library Road, Shankill, Co Dublin. Admission €5, in aid of Blackrock Hospice.