Here's a dreadful thing to admit. My green-fingered friend and I drove down to the opening of the new St Fiachra's Garden at the National Stud with mischief in our hearts. The garden, a celtic-flavoured four-acre development, with a Waterford Glass central feature, is the stud's millennium project, costing over one million pounds. It wasn't the vast expenditure that kindled the badness in my companion and me (although it probably helped keep it alight); no, it was the silly prose in the "self-guide" brochure. "A woodland is a place where every tree is a unique shape," it told us gravely. "You don't say!" we remarked archly to each other - and hooted happily when we spotted the missing "h" in a highfalutin' reference to "Rodin's Burgers of Calais". I'm ashamed to say that our small car rocked with guffaws all down the N7, and our souls - unlike the one used as a simile for the Waterford Crystal Garden - were far from "pure and undefiled". We arrived for the garden's opening (by President Mary McAleese, no less) fuelled with wicked anticipation. We left a couple of hours later, almost humbled, and filled with something akin to admiration for the moody, watery fantasy that has been created on this area of marshy land at the stud. The designer is Martin Hallinan, erstwhile Director of Landscape Architecture at UCD, and the construction of the garden took the best part of a year.
Actually, "garden", in the sense of a cultivated space, isn't quite the right word. It is more a landscape, seemingly artless and natural - at least it will be when the newness has worn off it. It is, as I understand from Martin Hallinan, a celebration of St Fiachra, a 6th century Irish monk who went to live in France. Although there is no evidence that Fiachra ever made his own garden, he encouraged others to grow things, and thus is recognised by the French as the patron saint of gardeners (and, incidentally, the French fiacre, a horse-drawn cab, is named after him).
St Fiachra's Garden at the National Stud honours the saint by plunging us - literally, through a bulky, limestone, sunken portico - into an environment that evokes the untrammelled spirituality of early monasticism. We enter a place of rugged simplicity where chunks of water-worn limestone (from land reclaimed for farming near the Clare-Galway border) and gentle grassy peninsulas push into great, thoughtful pools of water. Indigenous plants - willow, oak, ash, herb Robert, garlic mustard, yellow flag iris - grow in little groves, nestle in boulder-crevices, or decorate the water's edge. Giant stumps of bog pine are splayed across the earth and rocks, and an eerie grouping of stark, branchless bog oaks stands in one of the small lakes.
Japanese maples grow by the waterside and by a rumbling, tumbling waterfall, striking (in my opinion) a slightly discordant note with their well-groomed, oriental appearance. Martin Hallinan isn't sure about them, either: "They may come out, they may stay. Other people have remarked on them too." The "core" of the garden is meant to be Irish, he explains, and "as you move away it becomes more internationalised."
The core is dominated by a trio of beehive-type stone huts perched on a rocky outcrop, and bounded by water. At the lakeside behind them a benign, bronze St Fiachra sits contemplating a seed. A low opening beckons us into the nearest hut (irreverently we wonder if the entrance is large enough to accommodate some of our broader-beamed American visitors).
In we go, to be swallowed up by darkness, but soon a dim glow from the adjoining cell urges us further. In we go again and are bathed in a mystical light emanating from a pair of subterranean "gardens", little treasure chests of crystal rocks, ferns, orchids, fossils, butterflies and spiders. They remind me irresistibly of the glass animals I used to collect when I was a child. But our President and, later, some Americans (who have, after all, managed to negotiate the doorways) were transfixed and mesmerised by the shimmering Waterford glass. Someone says to Mrs McAleese: "In a thousand years they're going to be saying this is the Newgrange of Kildare".
Well, I think that's just a little optimistic, but certainly St Fiachra's Garden will eventually rank among the great themed gardens of our country. Our ancestors were fond of building theatrical, dramatic landscapes: landscapes such as Kilfane, with its manufactured torrent and bucolic thatched cottage dating from the 1790s; Belvedere with its fantastical mid-18th century sham ruin; and, of course, the Edwardian Japanese Gardens, also at the National Stud. St Fiachra's Garden continues that interesting tradition.
St Fiachra's Garden, the Japanese Gardens and the National Stud are open daily from 9.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission: adults £6; senior citizens and students, £4.50; family ticket (2 adults and 4 children), £14.
Diary Dates: June 23-27: Norwich Union Mallow International Garden Festival takes place at Cork Racecourse. Tickets: adults, £7; senior citizens, unemployed and groups (10 or more), £5; family rate (2 adults and 2 children), £16; children under 5 free. Credit card bookings: 021-251983. Details also available on the Internet at www.gardenfestival.com