Come into my garden

GREEN PEOPLE:If you take seed catalogues to bed, dream of mulch, and plant bulbs by the hundreds rather than the dozen, then these pages are dedicated to you. Our own gardening expert Fionnuala Fallon has rounded up some of the country's most enthusiastic amateur gardeners and finds that, often, the roots of a gardening habit are to be found buried deep in childhood

Prickly business

Michael Harrington's love affair with cacti began with a spiky gift

SCULPTURAL, SPINY or bristled, with exotic, brilliantly colourful flowers that are often (but not always) sweetly scented – it's not hard to understand the fascination cacti and succulents hold for some gardeners.

Michael Harrington's 30-year-long love affair with these plants began quite innocently, when his then-five-year-old son Niall gave him a birthday present of a Lace aloe, or Aloe aristata. "I decided I'd have to look after this little plant properly, so I went to my local library to do a bit of research. Very soon I was hooked."

Harringon is a founding member of the Cactus and Succulent Society, and his collection of cacti and succulents now numbers in the thousands, most of it housed in a large polytunnel and a couple of glasshouses in his garden in Saggart, Co Dublin.

The rarest and strangest of them all is probably Hoodia gordonii, a leafless, spiny succulent native to South Africa whose flesh-coloured flowers smell strongly of rotting meat.

"The flowers are quite remarkable," says Harrington admiringly, impressively indifferent to the fact that the evil stench of the blooms attracts bluebottles in their dozens into the glasshouse. "Yes, the flowers stink, but that's the way that the plant attracts pollinators. It's very clever."

Does his now-adult son share Harrington's passion for these strange plants? "Niall has a few but, no, not really. In fact he often blames himself for starting me off. But he's a professional horticulturist with South Dublin County Council, so we definitely share a love of gardening."

See irelandcactus.comor call 087 2308330, Harrington sells his plants at ISNA fairs, isna.ie

Drawn outdoors

Artist Wendy Walsh found her calling relatively late in life

ENGLISH-BORN, 97-year-old Wendy Walsh is probably best known as Ireland's most admired botanical artist, whose long-standing professional collaboration with the taxonomist and horticulturist Dr Charles Nelson has led to the publication of at least a dozen highly regarded books on the various flora and garden plants of Ireland. Asked what she particularly likes about gardening, she says simply that "I like growing things. Growing them and painting them."

Walsh came to her calling relatively late in life, when her children were reared and she finally had ample time to apply to her craft. Intellectually curious, keenly sighted and physically robust, friends say that even up to her late 70s/early 80s, Walsh was still "hopping about the Burren like a mountain goat". Old age has slowed her down somewhat since then but she still paints occasionally.

Although she created her own lovely garden in Glebe House in Lusk, north Co Dublin, 12 years ago Walsh moved to Burtown House in Co Kildare, home of her daughter, the artist and gardener Lesley Fennell.

With her came the many rare or unusual plants that she had collected and painted over the years. Recipient of numerous RHS awards, Walsh was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College in 1997, while in 1998 she was made a life member of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). She is the only living artist represented in the Chester Beatty collection.

Earlier this summer, the Fennell family opened a gallery, café and shop at Burtown House, where Walsh's work is on permanent display.

Plenty of air time

Gardening began as an escape for broadcaster Áine Lawlor

WHEN MORNING IRELAND's Áine Lawlor was diagnosed with breast cancer last September and then told that she'd start chemotherapy the next month, one of the things she was determined do before beginning treatment was to plant the tulip bulbs she'd ordered.

"I get thousands of bulbs every year from Holland – they're my little luxury. I knew I'd be too sick once chemo started so it was a case of planting them before it began. I so looked forward to seeing them flowering this spring."

Although already enthusiastic as a teenager (her grandmother was a great gardener), Lawlor's interest in gardening was properly awakened about 10 years ago.

"My family circumstances changed and I found myself much more tied to the house. Gardening gradually became my escape and then my passion. Now I think about it all the time, particularly if I find myself in a bit of a mental rut. It really refreshes me."

Her work as an RTÉ presenter aside, these days Lawlor balances her time between her small-town garden in Rathgar where she's managed to squeeze in a miniature glasshouse, roses, perennials, apple trees and topiary specimens, and her large allotment in Enniskerry in Co Wicklow, the latter which she tries to visit "one, maybe two times a week, maximum". She has maintenance of both down to a fine art.

"I'm a great fan of Charles Dowding and his no-dig method. Get the timing right and then it's usually a simple case of 'weed, plant, harvest . . . weed, plant, harvest'. Except that this year's tsunami conditions have resulted in these monstrously huge, fat slugs that seem to be copulating like nobody's business.

"I've tried everything to stop them but they've still taken my French beans, my lettuces, my dahlias, even my hemerocallis. Now I'm completely slug-obsessed. Even when I'm on air, I'm half-wondering what they're up to."

Best in show

Grower John Warren has a string of awards to his name

JOHN WARREN IS THE proud holder of not one but two large Dublin allotments.

The winner of last year's RDS Allotment Awards' Experienced Gardener category, he has lovingly tended one of them, on Turvey Avenue in Donabate, for the past 25 years. The other (the award-winning one, 20 minutes' drive away) is part of the Fingal Allotments complex near the Naul in north Co Dublin, which Warren took on in 2009. And that's not to mention his town garden in Malahide.

So what does he grow? "Lots of stuff. Potatoes like British Queen, Kerr's Pink and Golden Wonder, cabbages, beetroot, French beans, runner beans, broad beans, sweetcorn, parsnips and cauliflower as well as apples, strawberries, gooseberries and loganberries and plenty of sweet pea."

Warren is a seasoned expert at growing vegetables and flowers for the show-benches, exhibiting his produce at the numerous North County Dublin Horticultural Association summer shows, as well as at the annual Tullamore and Virginia shows every August.

He's won plenty of prizes, too. "I exhibit the full range of vegetables every year, but sweet pea are probably the most difficult to grow to exhibition standard. There are about six to seven competitive growers in the Dublin area and we all take it very seriously. It demands a lot of commitment."

Any tips for novice growers? "The best way to learn is by talking to other competitive growers. And by your own mistakes; I can tell you that I made plenty of them in the early years."

School of rock

The garden at Grouse Lodge recording studios is something of a refuge from a noisy world

CLAIRE GUNNING, the owner of Grouse Lodge recording studios in Co Westmeath, is hooked on gardening. It's because she's a masochist, she says.

"Something strange happens when you hit 30; the pubs seem too noisy, the music too loud. You start noticing plants in a way that you didn't before. It's like a disease that takes root, and next thing you're scrabbling around in the mud with a packet of seeds."

When Gunning and her husband bought the lodge in 1999, the centuries-old house was in need of renovation so the builders were called in. Whenever the noise and the dust got too much to bear, Gunning would escape to the garden.

"I'd dig a hole. Or, better still, dig up a leylandii; there were loads when we first came here, but not any more. The previous owners weren't into gardening, so the grounds had been maintained in 'slash and burn' kind of way, with lots of strimming and spraying of weed-killer. We stopped all that and, with the help of friends and fellow gardeners, bit by bit we've brought it back to life."

These days the walled garden is filled with flowers and vegetables. Last autumn Gunning discovered a dozen ceps (the much coveted "penny bun" mushroom) growing in another part of its five-acre grounds. A visit by Aubrey Fennel of the Tree Council confirmed that it's also home to rare and unusual trees, as is the arboretum of neighbouring Coolatore House, which the couple also own.

"The minute I find someone with half a clue about gardening, I attach myself like a limpet. And it's astonishing how many famous rock stars are into gardening. I send them out into the garden to pick tomatoes and they love it."

Artistic expression

Artist Jane O'Malley created this country garden in Kilkenny with her late husband, Tony

ALTHOUGH THE CANADIAN-BORN artist Jane O'Malley and her late husband, Irish artist Tony O'Malley, first bought their property in Kilkenny in 1978, it was the late 1980s before the couple began renovating the tiny labourer's cottage, and another few years before they started work on the one-acre grounds around it. "I grew up in Montreal where, being an Englishman, my father had this very beautiful, English-style country garden, filled with neatly divided vegetable beds, rose bushes . . . I was influenced a lot by that when it came to creating our garden in Kilkenny," says Jane. "I loved the idea of a dovecote, a garden pond, herbaceous borders. Then someone sent me a postcard of the famous laburnum arch in the Bodnant gardens in Wales and I wanted one of those too."

Over the two decades since it was first laid out, the garden at Physicianstown has gently matured, its lines softened by time, its edges slightly wilder. The pond that once featured in a series of Tony's paintings is more secret, the fountain long gone. But the dovecote is still there (if no longer the doves), as is Jane's studio (once shared with Tony), which is hidden in a quiet corner. "I love the fact that parts of the garden are now quite untamed, that sheets of snowdrops are followed by daffodils and wild grasses. Other parts are deliberately more formal – I enjoy that contrast."

Helped by Sean Greene of Kilkenny Landscapes, O'Malley has continued to develop other areas of the garden. "I've had a bad back on-and-off for years, so while I work in the garden a couple of days a week, I just couldn't do it all myself. Instead, I do most of the lighter work while Sean's a great help with what I call the man's work – things like cutting the the hedges, the lawns, or helping me fit a new filter on the pond." A few years ago, O'Malley treated herself to a new glasshouse that she's filled with tomatoes, plumbago and bougainvillea. "That's my little baby, a place where I love to spend time. I have lots of other secret, hidden spots in the garden where I also love to sit. I'll never leave this place. It's my private paradise, my secret little world, the garden that I made with Tony."

Plot plants

Mark Radix's designs combine his love of art, gardening and film

GARDEN DESIGNER Mark Radix had planned a career in fine art but after a degree at the Chelsea College of Art Design found himself drawn to the earth instead. "I started tending this almost derelict garden in King's Cross, and I experienced that extraordinary thrill that comes with discovering something that you truly love doing."

His early childhood years were spent exploring the large gardens of his paternal grandmother on the Caribbean island of Grenada. "She had this astonishing garden where she grew mangoes, pineapples, giant Caribbean cherries, anthurium lilies underneath a huge avocado tree and huge baskets of ferns. In fact one of my earliest memories is of her asking me to pee into a bottle, so that she could dilute it down and use it as a plant feed!"

Once Radix rediscovered his love of plants, he quickly found himself working for the noted Irish-born landscape designer, Declan Buckley, building and planting gardens all around London. In 2005, he moved to Dublin (his mother's hometown) after being offered a job with Irish garden designer Bernard Hickey. He now divides his time between Dublin and Cork, putting his creative talents to use on a diverse range of garden design projects as well as doing the "greens" for film sets. Recent projects include a Dublin garden for the award-winning, young IT company Eightytwenty4D and work on the sets of both Asterix and Obelix and the BBC production Loving Miss Hatto.

Radix has just begun work on his own new garden in Bishopstown in Cork, which he acquired just two months ago "I'm fine when it comes to making pragmatic design decisions about other people's gardens but I've found that it's one of the hardest things to with my own, particularly when I have to take my partner's likes and dislikes into account. I know that I want to make a garden that's sustainable, that encourages wildlife, that uses native plants and natural materials … It's about taking inspiration from the landscape around me in a way that's creative, inventive, contemporary and original. For example, one idea I'm tinkering with is a wall planted up with Irish carnivorous plants. That'd be fun."

Simple pleasures

When Helen Murphy began to lose her sight, her garden became her saviour

THE FIRST time Helen Murphy suffered retinal detachment, she was in her 20s with two children under the age of two. "Suddenly I was blind in one eye."

Surgery was briefly successful, but three weeks later the retina detached again, followed by the retina in her other eye. Further surgery restored her sight, but gradually she developed cataracts. After yet more surgery, artificial lenses were inserted into both her eyes. "That was great for a long while, but then gradually my sight started deteriorating again. When I eventually went back to Dr Hayes, he discovered that I was developing a condition known as tunnel vision, as well as glaucoma and macular degeneration. I was told that as I got older, my eyesight would gradually deteriorate."

Murphy continued to raise her family (she now has three adult children whom she calls "my absolute life") while renovating the family home – a cottage in Tallow, Co Waterford – with her husband. Another more recent blow to her health was the diagnosis of polymyalgia rheumatica, from which she is still recovering. Despite it all, her half-acre country garden is now filled with a curving lawn, specimen trees, a pergola and shrubs, and cottage garden favourites such as lupins and alliums.

"I've been through some very, very tough times, but the garden has always been my therapy, my saviour. Even when you have very little money, you can always find a few quid for a plant, or raise [a plant] from a slip. And although I'm registered blind for the last 10 years, I can still see the plants well enough to enjoy them," she says. "Just simple things, like the sight of a bud opening or a leaf unfurling, always bring me great joy."

Walled paradise

Benedictine monk Fr Brian Murphy got his first taste of gardening as child of the war

AS A CHILD EVACUEE during the second World War, London-born Fr Brian Murphy spent several years living in the rural village of Moreton Pinkney in Northamptonshire, where he enjoyed helping out in the tightly knit community at busy times of the farming year.

That first taste of farm life stood him in good stead when he joined the Benedictine community of Douai Abbey in Berkshire in 1954, where he worked in the large gardens every day, looking after the animals or tending the vegetable allotment.

When he later joined the Benedictine community of Glenstal Abbey in Co Limerick, Fr Murphy brought with him that can-do attitude. Aware of their great historical value, he set about restoring several of the abbey's walled gardens, as well as its orchard, helped by fellow monks, novices, students and "men of the roads" staying in the abbey's hostel (now closed).

In one, a 300-year-old Italianate-style walled garden, Fr Murphy created a Bible garden with steep terraces filled with a vast collection of shrubs, flowering perennials, grains, herbs and vegetables, all selected because of their religious significance.

Another, known as the Lady's Garden, has gradually been brought back from the wilderness it had become. In a third, he planted native trees that represent the Celtic tree calendar, as based on the Ogham alphabet.

When he isn't writing (he's currently working on a history of Glenstal Abbey's gardens for Columba Press), Fr Murphy is gardening.

"Every afternoon, after song mass and a spot of lunch, I'll work in the gardens until six o'clock evening prayer. Manual work is part of the Benedictine tradition. To quote St Benedict himself, 'Then are they truly monks when they work with the labour of their hands.' "

Small is beautiful

Andrew Murray's collection of 200 bonsai tree keeps him busy

A FORMER market gardener and cabinet-maker, Andy Murray's passion for bonsai – the Japanese art of growing miniaturised trees in containers – began in his teenage years – he bought his first bonsai tree, a Chinese elm, in 1970 for £20. He still has that tree, which is one of hundreds he keeps in his garden in Lusk in Co Dublin.

Many of the others he's grown from seed, painstakingly training and repeatedly pruning each tiny specimen with a nail scissors or sharp secateurs to achieve the desired shape.

Murray goes to great lengths to ensure the health of his trees, sieving the soil with a very fine flour sieve and discarding the fine dust to ensure a free-draining granular mix. Tender specimens go indoors into the conservatory or the utility room during the winter months.

Now that he's no longer working (the downturn put paid to his cabinet-making business), he has even more time to devote to his hobby.

"Bonsai is the perfect combination of my interest in things oriental, horticultural and artistic," he says. "With a collection of this size , there's always something that needs doing, but the best part of the job is trimming. I might spend a couple of hours on one specimen. It's ecstasy."

In the last couple of years he's exhibited at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, much to the interest of the visiting public as well as other bonsai enthusiasts (one collector offered him €1000 for a specimen – an offer he politely declined).

Murray, however, modestly downplays his skills. "The Japanese are the masters of the art. They go to extraordinary lengths and have a list of rules you wouldn't believe. But I'm an Irishman. If it looks alright, I'm happy."

Second nature

HE'S BEST KNOWN as a member of the Irish contemporary folk music band, Kíla, and was once described as "the Jimi Hendrix of the bodhrán", but for a long time the musician Rónán Ó Snodaigh has also been a passionate garden maker. He credits his mother, who used to bring him along to her Dublin allotment as a young child, with first giving him his love of plants.

"Not that I'm one of those blackbelts in gardening types who knows the soil types and all the Latin names," he hastens to add.

Later, he worked with the landscaper Gerry Lehane, and then with another landscaper, Pat Kevil, which is how and when he learnt how to read a scaled drawing, build paths, steps, retaining walls, and even construct complicated water features.

His garden is in Carraig in Co Kerry. "I like creating strong structures and changes of levels in a garden, and then seeing what happens next. I enjoy that ongoing debate with Mother Nature, where I plant things that I like, and then she decides whether or not it's going to be allowed to stay." It's a debate that inspired Ó Snodaigh's first published collection of poetry, Garden Wars, published in 2008.

"A lot of my poems are about the garden, observing plants and creatures fight it out. Myself, I don't even try to kill the slugs and snails anymore. I pulled one off a stone earlier this summer and I swear it made this weird sound, as if it was screaming. It sounds so pathetic even as I say it, but it gave me such a fright. I thought 'I can't go round butchering these little creatures anymore. They play, they make love, they have kids. It's just not right. So now I leave them alone."

Nature first

Actress and Nama to Nature activist Serena Brabazon has 'always loved planting things'

ACTRESS SERENA BRABAZON made headlines earlier this year as one of the five core members of Nama to Nature, the activist group that planted thousands of native trees in half-finished ghost estates around the country as a protest at the damage wrought on Ireland's landscape by poor planning decisions. The group's actions quickly touched a nerve.

"People call us guerrilla gardeners, although for me that term has slightly different connotations," says Brabazon, who is the daughter of the Earl of Meath from Kilruddery in Co Wicklow. "Nama to Nature is our way of trying to heal some of the ugly scars left on the landscape by the building boom, by helping it to return to the wild, and perhaps inspiring communities around the country to do likewise. It's a way of saying, 'Hey, this is what might have been, if the diggers hadn't arrived.' We didn't expect the reaction that followed, which was a complete surprise."

During the ensuing media frenzy, the group was accompanied on its tree-planting trips by many curious journalists. One, a woman in her 20s, was invited to plant a tree herself. "You won't believe this but she planted it upside down," says Brabazon, still shocked by the memory.

With a forester for a father, there was never any risk Brabazon would do the same.

"I do have a small Dublin garden of my own where I grow fruit and vegetables, and while I don't know if I'd call myself a proper gardener, I've always loved planting things.

"With the Nama to Nature projects, we put an awful lot of thought into choosing native trees that would flourish in the local growing conditions. We got them from a great nursery called None-So-Hardy or, in the case of the willow, planted them as cuttings. "Later this month we'll be revisiting all of the estates to check how the trees are getting on. I'm looking forward to that."

For more details, see facebook.com/namatonature

Dates for your diary

Galway Garden Festival, Claregalway Castle, today and tomorrow; Specialist nurseries, botanical art exhibition and speakers including Joy Larkcom, Helen Dillon, Dr Matthew Jebb, Tom Moggach, Diarmuid Gavin Erwan Tymen. Details at galwaygardenfestival.com

Fruitlawn Gardens in Abbeyleix, Co Laois are holding their open day today and tomorrow (10am-5pm, €5 admission, children under-12 free) in aid of the local Alzheimers Association. Lunch on lawn by Gallic Kitchen, rare plants for sale. See arthurshackleton.comfor details

Green-fingered artists can try their hand at a spot of botanical illustration at Lismore Castle Gardens Gallery on August 7th. Running from 10am to 4pm, the workshop, led by renowned botanical artist Patrick O'Hara, teaches participants how to indentify, categorise and draw flowers in the wild. Tickets €50; with early booking essential. Contact Paul McAree on 058-54061 for details