EXTERIORS:Artist Michael Craig's unconventional gardening may be raising the eyebrows of his Dalkey neighbours, writes Emma Cullinan
LAST WEEK, artist Michael Craig was licking clematis buds at the front of his home. "Perhaps the neighbours think I'm mad, and perhaps they are right," he says, "but the tongue is very sensitive." The reason he was doing this was to detect whether a recent easterly wind, gushing towards his cottage near the sea in Dalkey, had carried in enough salt to damage his budding clematis, devastating the crop just as it had done a few years ago. "The salt saps moisture from flowers," he explains.
He and Gemma Fallon moved here 12 years ago from a house in Shankill, where they had created a garden from meadow and grass. The plot measured 16ft by 120ft and was divided into sections including a lawn, vegetable patch and cuttings area. While they have happy memories of that luscious land and miss being able to grow their own vegetables, they have created a magnificent garden in their current home, in the most unlikely conditions.
Their small, sloped back-garden gets no sun during the winter - it rises behind their house, moves around behind a neighbour's home and then sets behind the back wall, never ascending high enough into the sky to beam into this Dalkey plot. In the summer, the sun climbs high enough to send in random rays but nothing that would nurture a sun-loving plant.
Michael is a great believer in growing from seed because, if it works, "it will stay forever" and he has been prepared to try and fail. In such murky conditions, some plants germinate, climb too high and keel over. Attempts to grow potatoes and tomatoes saw the plants progress through various stages of development, but never fruit. "I could give you a bouquet of tomato and potato flowers, but no proper, grown-up fruit," says Michael.
When he and Gemma moved here the garden sloped up from the rear of the cottage. The pair shifted tons of earth to create three levels. The first is now beneath a glassy garden room, the second comprises a raised, paved area and the third is the sloping plant bed.
Initially the glass room beside the house was called the palm house and the couple put in some Canary Island date palms ( Phoenix canariensis) which had been nurtured from seeds they brought back from the Canaries in 1991. But the palms weren't happy and were moved outside where they thrived and now tower impressively.
Having moved those plants one step to the north, the houseplants were moved out to the garden room and are expanding into their generous home. A Swiss cheese plant is indeed a big cheese in here, while a blushing bouganvillia sweeps across the top of one wall. This too came back from that Canaries holiday as a small plant. Also in here is a bird of paradise, which flowers (or beaks, perhaps?) every two years, plus jasmines and a fig tree.
A large granite boulder emerges through the flag floor. Unsuspecting guests have been known to try and shift their chairs onto it when dining out here, never quite sure what is hampering their progress.
There was another rock by the door and Gemma brought in a specialist to see about moving it. "He said, 'Jaysus Missus, this goes all the way down to Kerry.' He found its seam and chiselled the top off: "There was no need for dynamite," she says. And that approach - working with nature to achieve desired ends - has reaped rewards throughout the outdoor space.
This is evident in the sloped garden that was a sea of shrubs, privet, weeds and eucalyptus when they moved here; now the fern-rich bed looks a like a slice of exotic woodland transplanted into south Dublin.
Sloping up from the terrace is a bed held in by a granite dry-stone wall built from rocks dug out of the earth. It's filled with ferns and palms such as a lofty Tasmanian tree fern ( Dicksonia Antarctica), brought for "about €2.50" in a garden centre a few years ago. "They are hard to grow in other places or to propagate," says Craig, "but they even grow in cracks in the wall here - people would die for that."
There are also some huge Cordyline australis(New Zealand cabbage palm), as well as ferns, including spleen wort ( Asplenium spp) and Hart's tongue ( Asplenium scolopendrium) and sedums; "If I break off a stalk and stick it somewhere else in the wall, I guarantee that it will have grown by this time next year," says Michael, doing just that.
The paving beneath us is beginning to disappear beneath Lady's Mantel ( alcamilla Mollis), which creates a carpet as summer approaches.
The dark and damp conditions are an ideal habitat for slugs and snails, hence a garden full of plants they don't like to eat. But there are exceptions and a pair of Japanese banana plants ( Musa basjoo) are growing in pots, so Michael can keep a close eye on them and monitor mollusc activity. If he sees any damage, he knows he will find a slug nestled deep in an unfurling leaf. "The plants love it here. I would like to put them into the ground but it is too dangerous." While some plants are kept in pots for their own protection, others are cultivated in case they are needed to fill holes in the garden, perhaps after other species have failed.
The Canary Island date palms grown from seeds that came back in the couple's luggage were cultivated long before they moved to this cottage. The house was in Michael's family (his father is architectural historian Maurice Craig) and a move here was always on the cards. So when they arrived at this shadowy plot the date palms were ready for action.
There are copious pots on the paved area, including Michael's annual sweet pea extravaganza. He does miss colour among these green palms and ferns, although there are common bluebells ( Hyacinthoides non-scripta), snap dragons ( Antirhinums) and yellow Welsh poppies (Meconopsis cambrica) as well as a Ceanothus(California lilac) which is meant to creep but has started climbing, probably in a search for light. But sweet peas come in "all colours except yellow" and this gardener, who is happy to let most plants do their own thing to some extent, puts a lot of effort into the sweet peas which he discovered would grow here "by accident". They flower from June to November and he proudly describes how they ran out of vases to put them in last year and plenty of friends and family were rewarded with bouquets.
Other spots of colour in the garden are provided on the eastern side which gets sun in the summer. Michael built a wooden fence here to prevent too much salty wind hitting the plants, and a semi-evergreen yellow jasmine and an evergreen white one, as well as a deep red lobster claw plant (Heliconia), have raced up the wall and left their support to fold over the path in an arc.
He is generous when it comes to watering and has put a rose-scented geranium in a small pot so that he can't give it too much fluid. "I would say, 'here you go geranium, have some more water' and rot its roots." Licking the clematis, then, is all part of that nurturing approach that has created such a healthy garden.