"WHAT a pity you bought a site where you can't possibly grow anything, especially as you are so interested in plants!"
remarked Brian Wood's friends 25 years ago. And privately, they wondered had he lost his marbles somewhere along the way to sign the deeds. But he - the proud new owner of an almost vertical, grim, scrubby slope: the site from hell - had plans.
I started at the back, at the boundary and dug until I uncovered the rock, and then I just followed it down," he says. The rock, a whopping great granite outcrop behind the house which Brian built on weekends and evenings over five years, is now home to one of the most enviable and lovingly tended plant collections in Co Dublin.
"I levered loose rocks out of the crevices to make planting holes," explains the indefatigable gardener. "Some of the things are growing in only three or four inches of soil, so they don't run around like they do in other gardens."
Sixty five varieties of rhododendron, some so tiny, like the white flowered `Wren', that you'd miss them if you blinked; 20 different violas including the velvet black `Molly Sanderson'; countless pleiones, the terrestrial orchids from Asia; many maples and over 20 ferns: these and hundreds of other plants sprout miraculously from the inhospitable granite.
Inhospitable only in appearance: in fact the granite acts as a vast, heated propagator, encouraging seeds which remain dormant in other gardens to germinate. "The seeds drift downwards and grow in cracks where I couldn't plant them myself," says Brian, "and if they turn out really nice, I take them out of the upper part and plant something else. The garden sort of moves downwards itself."
This is a garden full of artifice, but so carefully tempered that nothing looks contrived. A very ordinary conifer, Chamaecyparis `Boulevard' - "the first purchase I ever made," has had its inner branches removed to give it a spare, oriental appearance, while Pittosporum `Garnettii', usually a tree of ungainly corpulence, has been pruned into a tall, stately column. And in the corner of a patio running along two sides of the house, a small pond is fed by a dribble of water which creeps over moss covered stones. The dribble is of course powered by a pump, but there is no whirr of machinery and no unseemly hardware.
Surrounded by lush marginal planting, including rare orchids - Dactylorhiza elata from the Chatham Islands; insect-eating butterworts - Pinguicula grandiflora; dwarf bulrushes and white arums, the pond is a haven for neighbourhood birds. They come to bathe, to borrow moss for their nests ("I don't begrudge them, it grows back again") and to feast on gourmet snacks specially imported from England - meal worms, live and kicking.
ON the patio there are 18 troughs filled with alpines and succulents. A mammoth rapier leaved agave, from Trinidad, clears a wide space like a bad tempered swordsman. Its painful spines have pierced more than one unsuspecting buttock over the decades.
But the most precious gem in the entire garden is tucked away inside the conservatory. A glass terrarium just a couple of feet high and wide houses a little patch of rain forest. "This is my part of the jungle," says Brian. Indeed it is. Hundreds of teeny weeny plants bromeliads, ferns and rare orchids - tumble over each other, clinging to the side of a pint sized ravine. Air plants perch on twists of wood, flowering and setting seed. A minute waterfall drops through a mossy crease and into a pool. The tropical climate, controlled by a fan, a pump and lights, is carefully regulated by a timer. An aquarium heater creates just the right steamy conditions.
It is the ultimate virtuoso performance in this garden: the garden with over 2,000 different varieties of plants, the garden which Brian Wood had been assured would be barren.