ROVING WRITERS: Novelist and recent Rooney Prize winner Claire Kilroy visits west Cork, where the great gardens make her eyes wobble.
It's always gratifying to enter a new phase of your life, especially if the last phase was a pain in the face. I initially mistook my recent passion for gardening as a sign that I was getting older. So did my friends. However (as I keep telling them), this garden-love is actually proof that I'm getting younger. It's a celebration of the things that thrilled me as a child - shapes, colours, textures, smells. When asked by The Irish Times whether I'd like to be a tourist in my own country, I said yeah, absolutely, and could I please go on a gardening holiday? The result was the West Cork Garden Trail.
The trail consists of 16 gardens, six of which I visited, that have been selected for their outstanding character and beauty. My mother and I arrived in Bantry in the evening and made an unscheduled stop at Bantry House. The house itself was closed, but visitors are welcome to enter the gardens providing they place €3 in the honesty box. It was a balmy breezy evening at the end of June, and we spent an hour-and-a-half wandering around the place entirely unimpeded. The sun was setting, the light was low and golden, and people were sitting around enjoying it.
The place is a wonderland. The garden was laid out in the 19th century by Richard White, the 2nd Earl of Bantry, who was inspired by his travels to Europe. It is built on seven terraces in the Italian style. The hundred steps, or "Stairway to the Sky", was built in the 1840s as part of the famine relief effort. Mrs Shelswell-White, whose home it now is, reckons that in fact most of the steps and walls were built as famine relief, but no records exist of how the garden was done. The archives are missing.
Restoration began in 1985, based on the skeleton garden and old photographs. The Wisteria Circle is 150 years old, and the trunks are phenomenal in themselves. The rose garden is planted with highly scented 19th-century roses, one of which Mrs Shelswell-White is hoping to have registered as "the Bantry House Rose", as experts have so far been unable to identify it.
The most endearing features of the garden are the whimsical and unexpected touches, such as the flat sea of rosemary dotted with bobbing allium globes, or the bed of Russian sage with tufts of phoenix palm pushing through. As Mrs Shelswell-White says, it may not adhere to strict garden design, but it's fun.
As we drove down the roads of Sheep's Head, with the trees leaning at 45-degree angles to the land, I wondered what in the name of God could be grown in Cois Cuain, Bob and Mary Walsh's seaside garden. The answer is tons. "Except acers," Mary says. "They don't like the salt wind." She wasn't joking about the salt wind. We came back with our hair standing up. Cois Cuain is, like many of the gardens, a joint effort. Bob builds the walls, Mary sets the plants. The walls are a work of art. They're constructed from stones that Bob finds lying around. He has fashioned an arched window-seat at the highest point facing out onto the Atlantic.
When they bought the place in 1992, there was a pine tree and a palm tree, nothing else. Now it's full of exotic things that I'd never heard of, let alone seen. They found that Australasian and South African plants did well, as well the more traditional rambling roses and fuchsia. Mary belted up the hill like a mountain goat to show us the 65 oak saplings she had received for her 65th birthday. They weren't saplings any more, and Mary was fitter than me. Gardening is a sign of youth, as I keep telling everyone.
Shirley Bendon's "Coach House Garden", Glandore, has such a commanding prospect of the harbour that it's worth coming for the view alone. She describes it as a "plantswoman's garden" - it has been put together by choice of plants rather than grand design. Scent has predominance. Shirley also likes growing things that are edible - plums, mulberries, figs, apples, kiwis. She grows grapefruits in the old vine house "for sheer devilment", as well as peaches, kumquats, olives and tangerines.
She picks seeds off the pavements when she's on holidays, and takes them home and propagates them to see what they are. Her friends send her seeds instead of postcards. They have come from Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Madeira, South Africa and Ecuador. Some of the seeds have produced plants that remain unidentified, but they're thriving due to the warming effect of the Gulf Stream on Shirley's garden.
Phemie Rose of Kilravock Gardens has exotic specimens that might just bite you, such as her Aeonium arboreum "Zwartkop" from Mexico. She has 73 varieties of hostas, a fernery and a "southern hemisphere walk". She, too, grows practically everything from seed and speaks gardening like it's a different language.
Hazel & Eugene Wiseman's Carraig Abhainn Gardens in Durrus has the village's old water supply creating a waterfall at the back of it. Kingfisher and dippers live on the banks. Their garden is eclectic and full of personality. Right now, one bed features a waist-high carpet of double-flowered red poppies, with a lime-green acer in the middle. It makes your eyes wobble.
Christine and Les Wilson of "Aultaghreagh Cottage Garden", Dunmanway, have a photograph on their wall of how their garden looked before they got stuck into it six years ago. Cottage, wall, field. Now they have a bog garden, a secret garden, tunnels, arbours, millions of flowers and a fragrant herb parterre (a maze-like affair made out of box-hedge to you and me).
Most gardens sell a selection of their plants. Many have charity days, and some, such as the Walshs' seaside garden, is open entirely in aid of charity. The owners are exceptionally generous and kind people. Most of them are happy to speak to visitors, and equally happy to leave them alone if they'd prefer. They answered all my questions, no matter how stupid. I left nowhere empty-handed. I got poppy seeds, rambling rose and fuchsia cuttings, two home-grown lemons, a punnet of strawberries, lemon balm, basil plants, a recipe book (from the B&B, see panel) and a football-sized allium from Bantry House.
The allium was a funny one. I admired it, so Mrs Shelswell-White dug it up and presented it to me, bulb still attached. I set off down the driveway carrying it like a big sparkler, and all the other tourists whispered and gave me filthy looks. No, I didn't nick it, it was a gift, actually.
The trail, I have to say, was a fantastic experience, as much for the people as their creations. I left considerably more informed, and look forward to returning to see the other gardens, and the same gardens at different times of the year.
Continuing our summer series in which Irish Times and other writers turn tourists in their own land, Claire Kilroy travelled to Cork as a guest of Fáilte Ireland, the National Tourism Development Authority. For more information on holidays in Ireland, see www.ireland.ie