A 'rosarie' in a walled garden offers a secret place in which to admire the beauty of the rose, writes Jane Powers
LAST WEEK I WROTE about roses, but I didn't mention the kind of roses that I enjoy more than any other. I think I'm not alone in my choice: other people's roses. Those are the ones that are often the best. We don't have to prune them, tie them in, feed them, mulch them or otherwise deal with their needs. If they're looking a bit peaky, or feeling off colour, or at the risk of some horrible fungus, it's no concern of ours. Our job is just to admire.
And that is exactly what I was doing recently in the "rosarie" at Lodge Park Walled Garden in Straffan, Co Kildare. Here, a huge climbing frame for roses holds within its embrace a nearly secret place, furnished with a pair of inviting benches. You can sit here for hours, hidden from view, catching and examining the individual fragrances that waft past your nostrils. The decorative iron structure, which rises many metres high, supports at least a dozen different pink, white and cream roses, and looks fantastically rococo - like one of Marie Antoinette's more flamboyant summer dresses.
Among the roses creating this illusion are 'Cecile Brunner', 'Rose d'Amour', 'Pink Grootendorst', 'Felicité et Perpetué', 'Wedding Day', 'Belvedere' and 'Rambling Rector'. These last two have Irish connections: the candy-pink 'Belvedere' was named after Belvedere House in Co Westmeath; and the creamy 'Rambling Rector', which is partnered here with the deep blue Clematis x durandii, was named and introduced at the famous Daisy Hill nursery in Co Down. Both roses are strappingly vigorous, and are perfect for sending on missions up trees, across the front of houses, or into immense climbing frames, as here.
Rose pruning and tying-in, says Lodge Park gardener Patrick Ardiff, starts in autumn, but goes on into winter. It's a time-consuming job, and I don't know where he gets the patience. But the results are stupendous.
The rosarie is tucked into a corner of the meadowy orchard, and you come upon it almost by mistake (the best way to happen upon something delightful in a garden). There is much else to please in this 18th-century walled garden, which is divided into neat beech and box enclosures, and which has been substantially restored since the 1980s. A fine herbaceous border leans in to watch the action on a tennis court beyond the rose garden.
It faces south, so all the plants are fairly drought-proof, among them spiky cardoons, great clouds of the Caucasian seakale (Crambe cordifolia) and football-sized heads of Allium christophii.
This is a productive garden too, so there is plenty of food-growing in among the finery. Vegetables are cultivated in narrow beds, managed on a no-dig system. Methods differ from garden to garden, but here, manure is added to the soil surface in winter, and the worms dig it in during the ensuing months,
One of the more recent additions at Lodge Park is what Ardiff calls the "been-to-Chelsea-too-many-times border", a pair of long beds that face each other across a neat grass strip. Each is backed by multiple specimens of the impressively-dark elder, Sambucus 'Black Lace' (launched at the world's most famous flower show in 2003), which has deeply dissected leaves and plate-like flowers filled with pink froth. Keeping company with the elder's dusky, ferny foliage is a clatter of deep red flowers on wiry stems, all regular Chelsea habitués: Knautia macedonica, Cirsium rivulare 'Atropurpurea', and Astrantia 'Ruby Wedding'. Soon to flower is a special form of Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium atropurpureum), called 'Gateway', which holds its flower-colour when the blooms die. Further down the border, blues creep in to cool the reds, in the form of plants such as a Japanese catmint, Nepeta subsessilis, Phlox 'Eventide', and a blue Galega orientalis.
The border has a strong presence, mainly because there is a limited but continually repeated palette of plants. And the black elder gives it a definite masculine feel. This plant, in common with all elders, can be pruned to the ground each spring, or even during the growing season, if you want to keep it from getting leggy. Pruning in this fashion (known as coppicing or stooling), often produces larger leaves on straight stems, and can be used on many shrubby plants.
A plant I'd never previously seen coppiced, before meeting it at Lodge Park, is the common dark barberry, Berberis thunbergii f. atropurpurea). Normally it's an unlovely, spiny thing with small, purple, oval leaves, and is much overused in low-maintenance landscaping, or where intruders need deterring.
But when given the springtime chop, it is magicked into a completely different plant, with excellent shape (nicely-arranged, parallel stems), and with leaves at least twice the normal size. And because there are fewer stems than on an ungroomed plant, the colour gradations on the leaves (from dark green to wine to deep brown) are more easily seen.
It's the learning of new tricks such as this that makes visiting gardens all the more rewarding. "It's not like going to a garden show where everything is made up for one weekend," agrees Ardiff. "It's a living garden that changes throughout the seasons. Come and see a real garden."
jpowers@irish-times.ie