Special care for seaside gardens

Most of us love to be beside the seaside, but the same cannot be said for many plants, which face threats from wind and salt, writes JANE POWERS

I ENVY OWNERS OF seaside gardens. Looking over the gate at the water and sand, hearing the whoosh of the waves, and breathing the freshest possible air, laden with salty seaweed smells: it must be like being on your holidays all the time.

The trouble is that if it’s in a busy location, it’s like being on everybody else’s holidays as well, as they file past your little corner of the coast, trailing ice-cream cones and children. On fine days, each cup of tea in the front garden is an experience shared with a curious audience.

This was the situation that presented itself at James Howley’s and Fionnuala Hayes’s Victorian end-of-terrace house in Sandycove. Their front garden is on one of that town’s busiest stretches, along which bathers and walkers make their way to Sandycove and the Forty Foot bathing place. Because it is west-facing, it gets all the good afternoon light, and is the perfect place for sitting out of a summer evening, for drinks, and even supper. To get around the privacy problem, the pair decided to construct a sunken area paved in Leinster granite next to the house: their own outdoor dining room, completely hidden from the road.

Being architects, they were able to design exactly what they wanted: a sheltered space, big enough for a convivial dinner party. It is set just a few centimetres lower than the path to the house, but is given intimacy by the tall granite rubble wall on one side and, opposite the house, a limestone-faced retaining wall which incorporates a long stone bench.

The soil at the top of this wall-bench – which is shoulder-height when you are sitting down – is planted with an evergreen screen of golden-awned giant oats (Stipa gigantea), Pittosporum tobira, and fig. Beyond this, a gentle grass slope (at the perfect gradient for lolling on) flows downwards for a few metres before levelling off to horizontal as it approaches the boundary and the busy road.

Because there are three children in the family, much of the garden is grassed, and a trampoline pit has been included in the design. In the years to come, when the children get tired of bouncing, it will be turned into a pond. Its circular shape is echoed again and again in the garden: in the adjacent patch of lawn and in the curved wall of the dining area.

Seaside gardens enjoy balmier temperatures than most, so it’s possible to grow unexpectedly tender plants. An olive, for example, is in the pink of health here, despite the fact that the last two winters have left piles of olive corpses behind them in Ireland’s chic gardens. But the sea also brings salt and wind, which can be cruel to coastal plantings, shredding and desiccating foliage. Only salt-resistant plants that can take a bit of a battering are suitable. Hayes took advice from plantswoman Daphne Shackleton, and has populated the space with appropriate candidates, most of which are woody plants. Among them are rosemary, lavender, arbutus, tamarisk, purple acacia, Russian sage (Perovskia), and the South African Melianthus major. All have either small, hard leaves, or a leathery, fuzzy or hairy surface, which repels salt.

This garden is not just about sitting out in private and growing appropriate plants, it also celebrates the seaside. A series of mosaics – made of Wexford beach pebble, from the Inish Pebble Company (wexfordbeachpebble.com) – makes up the path that runs from gate to front door.

Howley, who has consulted on 18th and 19th century shell-houses and grottoes, where pebble mosaics often feature on the floor, worked with friends and family to create a special Sandycove sequence. The sections depict various sea creatures, including gulls, shoals of fish, a jellyfish, a ray, a lobster, and the humble but beautifully sinuous bristle worm. And in the dining area there is a tap with a limestone basin where sandy feet can be rinsed off after a dip in the sea.

A fragmented poem has been engraved (by sculptor and stone carver Ciaran Byrne) onto a panel at the back of the basin: “hear waves break/ smell the wrack/ winds touch face/ tongue taste salt/ watch the sun set”. It looks familiar, but isn’t. After some urging, James admits it is his fabrication, but the placing of the lettering – in common with the rest of the garden – was the subject of much collaboration.

The website for James Howley’s and Fionnuala Hayes’s architectural practice is howleyhayes.ie

What plant?

The Royal Horticultural Society's online plant selector (http://apps.rhs.org.uk/plantselector) allows gardeners to input their garden's climate and conditions, and the kind of plant they are seeking. A list of suitable plants appears. Click on "more details to bring up a very good information page for each plant.