Norah Burgess of Tobinstown, Co Carlow, is keen on bearded irises. She has about 70 varieties outside her farmhouse, neatly lined up in two small beds - their shimmering petals like a silk-and-velvet patchwork quilt thrown out on the grass. But I'm afraid her irises got pretty short shrift when I drove down to visit her a couple of weeks ago. Rural Ireland stole the show. It was one of those blessed May days when the countryside has a vibrant resonance that makes us townspeople feel newly awakened and dizzy with the meaning of life. On days like that the heart soars as the city is left behind and big highways turn into cow-parsley-lined country roads.
Norah and Edwin Burgess's 19th century house sits close to a cluster of stone farm buildings, at the end of a drive with a hawthorn hedge on one side and a field of cows and sheep on the other. New life is abundant: week-old lambs punching into their mothers' teats and small calves lying in the grass. When I arrive a cow is about to give birth and from a distance I watch, with citydweller astonishment as a large balloon (the caul perhaps?) appears and disappears from her back end as if a champion bubblegum blower resides within. Two hours later a shiny black calf is standing and suckling at the baffling, but good udder. Three iridescent blue-black Cayuga ducks have bustled over to log the birth in the day's proceedings.
More ducks, ducklings rather - Indian runners, call ducks and little Cayugas - scramble around the yard after the two hens who have hatched them. Inside the house more potential ducklings in the form of eggs are ranged in an incubator or positioned on the dresser among the china, inscribed with laying-dates. All this business of growing life (farming, I suppose!) is a bit overwhelming to the urban gardener. We who make our little domains in the midst of petrol fumes, traffic and concrete occasionally manage to fool ourselves - if we don't look too far or listen too hard - that we're In Touch with Nature, and that we're genuine sons and daughters of the soil. But let's be honest, what we are doing is cultivating an oasis in the metropolitan desert. The big picture outside is one that, mostly, we're happier to ignore.
At Tobinstown, on the other hand, the big farming picture is utterly fascinating, and smack-bang in the middle of its 226 acres sits Norah's three-quarter-acre garden: a highly-worked detail in a broadly-brushed canvas framed by distant mountains. The house - with its geranium-filled porch - is fronted by a large lawn and four old Irish yews trimmed into odd, dark-green mushrooms. Borders and beds surround the lawn and are planted with a mixture of structural trees and shrubs and cottage garden perennials: cowslips, sweet rocket, oriental poppies, columbine, foxgloves. A field of some deepgreen stuff (wheat, I'm told) makes a lush, monochrome backdrop for the waving, pink bottle-brush heads of the tall bistort, Persicaria bistorta `Superba'.
In a shady area, big clumps of hostas make fat mounds of sculpted foliage; regularly cleared of slugs by the duck patrol, they bear scarcely a blemish. A geometric kitchen garden is tucked away in a sheltered area. Everywhere are the insistent sounds of farm animals and the constant presences of this or that busybody bird: a tiny lone Silver Seabright that's lost its mate, a pair of Blue Orpingtons with full jodhpurs of wafting, steely-grey feathers, Pekins - lavender, black and buff - and many other nameless fowl.
And what of these bearded irises that Norah grows and sells through mail order (carefully wrapped in tissue and posted all over the country in shoeboxes)? Yes, there are irises, grown separately in their own beds, and available for inspection, like a living catalogue from which you may order. And, yes, I've never seen an iris as yellow as `Harlow Gold', or as orange as the Miwadi-coloured `Marmalade Skies', or as beautiful as `Tantara', with its bristling blue beards, bronzepink standards and rusty-brown falls the colour of well-hung beefsteak. There are irises - very special, rare ones. I went to see irises, but was seduced by rural Ireland at its most alluring.
Tobinstown Gardens, Tullow, Co Carlow, are open each Sunday in June from 26 p.m. Other times by arrangement. Admission: £2. Bearded iris catalogue available at end of August. Irises posted in September and October. Phone: 0503 51233.
Norah Burgess writes a gardening column jointly with Danae Kindness (chief executive of Designyard in Temple Bar) in the Limerick Leader.
Competition: Closing date for the revamped Shamrock All-Ireland Gardens Competition is June 21st. A new panel of judges has been appointed and all gardens will be judged during July, instead of throughout the summer. And, now that the entry fee has been abolished, there's no excuse for not picking up a form at your garden centre or requesting one from Shamrock AllIreland Gardens Competition, Freepost, PO Box 20, Newbridge, Co Kildare.