I KNOW that I'm not alone in having had uncharitable thoughts about children running loose in beautiful gardens. And while the words "garden pests" have never actually slipped out, I must confess that it has been difficult to keep them buttoned in.
Well, that's all changed now, thanks to a particular bunch of small gardeners in the middle of Dublin: adorable gardeners, some with sticky-out ears, squeaky voices and razor-shorn, velvety hair; others with pony-tails and wearing tracksuit bottoms under their tunics. The boys and girls of Scoil Treasa Naofa, a primary school off Donore Avenue, have created the most charming, happy, productive - and ecologically sound - garden I've seen in a long time.
In this built-up area, they have made a green and leafy haven for orange-tip and peacock butterflies, frogs, blackbirds, thrushes, chaffinches, robins and all manner of things that fly, flutter, creep, crawl, wiggle and slither. There are vegetable patches and a herb garden, a tree nursery and a pond, even a cornfield, a meadow and a woodland. It's true, none of these is more than a few yards square but that doesn't matter - it all works perfectly. And what is remarkable is that many of the children live in the flats in St Teresa's Gardens, with no gardens at all of their own, despite the green-sounding address.
The head gardener, as it were, is their teach&, Paddy Madden, a man whose Co Clare childhood has left him with a deep-rooted appreciation of Mother Nature: her power, her rhythms and harmonies, and her fragile balance. And all is passed on to the children in the most gentle, practical and fun way possible. "We don't worry too much about teaching them the names, they kind of get those as they go along," says Paddy. "Instead, the whole idea is ecology, the dependence of creatures on plants and that kind of thing. The whole thing is woven in a web and anyone who breaks it there's trouble, you know, somewhere along the `harmony'."
Paddy Madden teaches third class, and at nine years of age, his pupils are well-seasoned gardeners. They staffed when they were in Infants: sowing seeds in milk cartons and nurturing the seedlings to healthy planthood. One of their early successes sits happily in a corner of the classroom. "Charlie Chestnut", hatched miraculously from a glossy, round conker, is a good friend through every season. "The leaves come on and the leaves come off," says Paddy. "And sometimes we take him out for a wash." "And we feed him cake," says one of the boys, Ian, chewing his own eleven o'clock bun. Charlie Chestnut's "cake" is rich, brown and crumbly, made from moss peat, leaf mould and compost.
The leaf mould and compost are both manufactured in the garden. Fallen leaves, collected from the ground, or donated by the Corporation, are allowed to rot down in a wire cage. Compost is made from the garden's waste but also from green bins in every classroom - filled with apple butts and other organic material - and collected each day by a big lad from sixth class.
The garden itself is based on the idea of a sheltered woodland glade. "It's like the Stone Age" explains Paddy, "except we're actually making the glade and then growing our crops in the centre." Neat rows of peas, beans, onions, potatoes, carrots, lettuce and spinach (which has to be good because Popeye eats it) are periodically observed and investigated by meticulous children with clipboards and worksheets. Pea tendrils climbing up sticks are noted, onions are counted and spud yields are estimated. And in the woods, seeds are pried from faded bluebells and sown, after all the trees have been counted and identified.
And because this is a wildlife garden, there are numerous different creature-friendly habitats and plants. Nettles, briars and other "weeds" all have their place. A young fella comes up with a hank of clingy goosegrass. "Look at the tiny flower on it," says Paddy, pointing out the minute white cross. "Do you know its name?" The boy does: "Sticky-Bum!" "Yes," approves Paddy, "Sticky-bum."