Today's city dwellers are unlikely to have big gardens, if they have them at all, but a few enterprising souls have found ways to indulge their growing passions, writes Catherine Cleary.
Sarah Hallahan sleeps to the sounds of trucks reversing. On her tiny apartment balcony, overlooking the Guinness delivery yard in central Dublin, she has managed to grow lavender and a few hardy flowers. Now she stands in an old walled garden in one of the city's most expensive residential areas. The rain is holding off. She has her gardening gloves on, and the birdsong and noise of the wind blowing through the witch hazel all but drown out the traffic from the road.
Hallahan has not just won the lottery (or indeed the several lotteries) that would be required to get her this much garden in Dublin 6. A few weeks ago she posted an electronic ad saying "Wanted: apartment-living horticulture student wants patch of earth to tend" on the Leinster branch of the Freecycle website.
She got quite a few replies, including one from her garden benefactor, Margery. Before Margery's mother died, at the age of 88, last year, she had managed to keep her front garden tended at the large house. The spring bulbs provide a splash of colour this year. But the rear garden had declined, and Margery was sad to see her mother's beloved space disappear.
For the apartment-bound horticulturalist it is a dream garden. There is a small greenhouse and long, fertile-looking flower beds that Hallahan hopes to turn into a sea of colour this summer.
The arrangement is mutually beneficial. Until recently the two women had not met, as Margery is based in the southeast, a good two-hour drive from Dublin. Hallahan is completing a home-study course with the Royal Horticultural Society, and her dream is to work as a landscape gardener. They arranged everything by e-mail and phone. "I think my mother would be pleased to see her garden being looked after," Margery says. About twice a week, Hallahan arrives on her bicycle from her office job and battles the bindweed to reveal old bedding plants and dark-brown soil.
Hallahan bought her apartment a few years ago with her partner, and its communal garden is nothing like the welcoming space she would like. "You can sit in it, uncomfortably," she says. "And you get the feeling if you brought a glass of wine down there on a summer's evening you'd be asked to leave." The garden is well-kept, but the caretaker has banned children after 6pm because of noise concerns.
The apartment garden is typical of the sterile plots of box-planted and patio-slabbed squares sold to first-time buyers as the ideal urban gardens. Looked at from behind glass, these patches are rarely used, and the concept of somebody putting a spade into the soil and planting something would probably be considered vandalism.
As spring finally arrives, the amateur gardener itches to get back out to the soil. But for an increasing number of apartment and town-house residents, their garden dreams are pot-bound, confined to plants that can withstand high winds on exposed balconies.
Shane McCarrick has taken the balcony garden to extremes at his town house. Last autumn he had a bumper harvest of more than a sackful of apples from his "orchard" - five apple trees in large tubs that live on his terrace in Lucan.
A civil servant with the Department of Agriculture and Food, McCarrick grew up on the family farm, west of Lucan. His family ran a pick-your-own fruit farm and nursery. He has fond childhood memories of collecting wheelbarrows of crab apples and straining the fruit through pillowcases to make apple jelly. The suburb of Lucan began to encroach, and his parents eventually sold as housing estates crept up around their boundaries. Now the fruit fields and nursery are part of the concrete landscape of this densely populated area.
McCarrick bought his town house in 2001; it came with a walled balcony, built over a first-floor apartment, measuring about five square metres (54sq ft). He has planted five apple trees and two Colorado firs. Another large tub holds his spring bulbs. Inside the town house, a two-and-a-half-metre (eight-foot) Easter cactus that used to stand in the bay window had to be moved farther in, as it was hitting the ceiling. McCarrick remembers sending away cereal tokens in the late 1980s to get the cactus that is now a major part of his living space, along with sisal grasses and a few members of the aloe family.
The inventory of items in his hall cupboard extends beyond the average vacuum and ironing board. "You'll find two chainsaws, a shovel, a spade, a strimmer, tools for stripping, two strong engines and the usual wellies and stuff," he says. "If anyone else living in an apartment told me they had a chainsaw I'd be half-worried they were a homicidal maniac."
In the policy area of the Department of Agriculture, his work is more likely to have him dealing with bananas than domestic fruit growing. He completed a four-year degree in forestry at University College Dublin and is determined to get a proper garden one day. He recently lost out after protracted negotiations to buy a house in Kildare.
"I love the outdoors and really find apartment living the ultimate exercise in frustration, even worse than sitting in traffic jams for hours every day. Apartment living is a new concept for Irish people, as we're used to our semi-detached with garden front and back. Even people who probably never lifted a finger in a garden now miss the idea of having one. You might take it for granted, but when it's not there it becomes another thing altogether."
What McCarrick and many like him long for is an allotment they could rent from the local authority, so they could spend the long summer evenings pottering around, as well as bringing back some home-grown produce.
Margaret Daly, who is a publisher, and her neighbours on Lullymore Terrace, in Dublin 8, happily tend land that belongs not to them but to Waterways Ireland. The small patches are across from their front doors, on the banks of the Grand Canal. "I just grow a few flowers and herbs," Daly says. Other neighbours with more time to garden have produced potatoes from the patches, and they recently got a good crop of rhubarb. On summer evenings the residents sit out and watch swans swim by.
Waterways Ireland cuts the grass and keeps the hedges in check. As far as Daly is aware, there is no formal arrangement for renting the allotments, but it has been a long-standing tradition of the terrace.
Britain and the rest of Europe have allotment cultures where urban gardeners get their green-fingered fixes courtesy of local-authority schemes. Berlin has more than 800 Schreber garden colonies, covering 4 per cent of the city. Named after a 19th-century doctor, the gardens are showcases for flower beds and garden design, as well as being used to grow fruit and vegetables. Dr Schreber, who was interested in the health benefits of green spaces, believed the gardens would give children room to breath and play in increasingly industrialised areas.
Central Dublin, where the need is greatest, has no allotment schemes. Land has simply become too scarce, according to the city council.
After the war there were allotments all over the city, but as their owners died they fell into disrepair and became problem areas. "It has been the best part of 20 years since we've had any," says a council spokesman. In the late 1960s the corporation, as it was then, had a budget of £1 million (€1.25 million) a year to buy land outside the city boundary for forward planning.
Much of it, in places such as Fettercairn and Blanchardstown, was let to allotment holders as the corporation waited for the funds to build on it. The city council has no plans to reinstate the allotments. "One thing we will be looking at is the use of open space, with playgrounds for kids in apartment blocks," the spokesman says.
Limerick City Council similarly has no allotment schemes. Outside the city centres, things are looking a bit brighter.
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown has about 50 allotments, on Mount Anville Road. Under Transport 21, the land is under the shadow of the Eastern Bypass if the road goes ahead, but that would not be for another decade.
South Dublin County Council has recently and controversially closed a scheme of 116 allotments at Lynch's Lane, in Clondalkin, but a spokeswoman says it has put together an expanded scheme in four locations: Mill Lane in Palmerstown, Corkagh Park in Clondalkin and Tymon Park and Friarstown in Tallaght. They have 80 allotment holders from Lynch's Lane to prioritise for the new plots and a waiting list of about 100 people after that. "The interest is phenomenal," the spokeswoman says.
In north Dublin, councillors recently voted to review all Fingal County Council's conacre property with a view to allocating allotment space, but it will be at least a year before any new plots are available. "Please make it clear," a spokeswoman says, "that there is nothing available now." The waiting list is more than 200 people long, and existing plots at Donabate and Finglas are full. At a rent of €30 a year, the allotments are hugely popular, and the council is inundated with requests whenever allotments are mentioned.
Ruth Fortune, an architect, saw that enthusiasm first hand last September, when she looked around one evening in the Dolphin's Barn Community Garden and counted more than 20 people harvesting and preparing the garden for winter.
Until last year the "garden" was an expanse of wasteland backing onto an industrial estate on the banks of the Grand Canal. Then a group of people got together and negotiated access to the site with the owner. Hazel trees and vegetables were planted, and leaflet drops and an exhibition in the local library attracted support.
"The amount of interest and energy was amazing," Fortune says. "It really seemed to have tapped into something." Unfortunately, the future for the garden looks uncertain, as the owners of the site have asked the community gardeners not to plant anything this year, and there are tentative plans for development of the site. The community gardeners have contacted Dublin City Council to see if a more permanent site could be found.
The commandeering of public wasteland for gardens has become a feature in London, where self-styled guerrilla gardeners carry out torch-lit planting sessions at night on wasteland, road verges and even traffic triangles.
The Dolphin's Barn group do not consider themselves guerrilla gardeners, and they hope to come to a compromise with the owners of the site or find a more permanent home for their efforts.
"I think it's good for the soul," Fortune says. "And when it's done on a community basis you know you're going to get some physical reward at the end. The great thing about group gardening is that you don't have the commitment of a full-time garden. You know that even if you can make it at a certain time, someone else will be doing their bit, too."