Another Life Michael VineyThat intoxicating high-pressure weather was great for getting things done outdoors with the help of some neighbourly muscle. The new polytunnel, my plastic palace, is up at last, stretched over six steel arches, firmly rooted, sheltered and largely concealed among the acre's young trees (it shimmers by moonlight, as if fairies dance inside).
I wander around in it on frosty mornings, thrilled with its balmy, peaceful glow and planning crops to fill some 50 square metres of raised beds. The idea is to save work, to let me garden at my own stiffening pace, under cover on rainy days, but already its microclimate beckons, not only for unseasonable salads and bigger and better sweetcorn, but peppers, aubergines, squashes, and tropical trusses of tomatoes.
Meanwhile, the hillside is still wrapped in its drab winter shawl of blond, dead grass and bracken; only the hollows of the old lazy beds show deepening stripes of green. A week of warm Atlantic winds could change the whole scene in time for April's lambs and remind many more than ourselves to get the motor-mower cleaned and serviced.
Rural lawns of suburban scale are a powerful symbol of change. Our own ragged patches of grass, tamed from old pasture by persistent mowing, make a mossy, daisy-starred foil to surrounding wildness. The expansive lawn more general to new bungalows becomes a statement, if only of not knowing how else to tidy up the site.
Just how far the big, isolating rural lawn offends against "traditional" landscape is demonstrated in a bold new publication from Cork County Council. The Cork Rural Design Guide: Building a New House in the Countryside is a joint product of the Cork county architect and the planning policy unit and its conviction shines out of every colourful page. My pleasure in its contents has been only partly dented by realising of late how little the political controllers of planning really care about such things.
Design guidance for countryside houses is nothing new: I remember the first of them in Ireland, published by An Foras Forbartha some 40 years ago. It was concerned with much the same elements: harmonious siting, design sympathetic to existing vernacular buildings, use of traditional materials and finishes, colours to fit with natural surroundings, and so on. It made little impact on rural development, and the Foras was not allowed to last for long.
The new Cork publication, however, itself brilliantly styled and presented, is more confidently specific and practical in its detail, showing the difference between good and bad rural siting and design, whether of whole houses or their details - windows, doors, chimneys, gateways, gardens.
Who made middle-class architects and planners the arbiters of taste? The authors (Colin Buchanan and Partners and Mike Shanahan and Associates) don't expect everyone to agree with their ideas and suggestions, but their starting point is the regional character of the county's rural buildings - forms, textures and colours that give the Cork countryside its distinctive sense of place. In traditional houses, simplicity of form and facade counts for a lot.
But they were so small and poky! Modern families want more space - hence the deep-plan designs with double-room depth, of most new rural, pattern-book houses. The guide offers solutions, often using contemporary narrow-plan forms that break down the bulk and let in the light, at little or no extra cost.
As for those lawns, the guide is quite clear on the principles: "Irish country gardens stand out from their suburban counterparts by the way they embrace the house and appear to connect seamlessly to the natural landscape from which they arise. Enclosure, privacy, semi-wild habitat, the absence of expansive lawns and the appropriate rural boundary treatment are hallmarks of a more naturalistic approach." So, no big, visible lawn between house and road, no concrete path corseting the bungalow (put plants between path and walls), no Leylandii or grisellinia hedges, shaped dwarf conifers, New Zealand flax, pampas grass...
The nearer to invisible, the better the new house will look (the one in the photograph, using narrow-plan design, is by Niall Hyde).
It's fine stuff, aesthetically and ecologically, and sets the sort of standard every county should aim for. It will impress no end of conscientious blow-ins, city migrants and second-homers. Getting it read and appreciated by the people who already live - and build - in the countryside may prove more of a challenge. It is available from the Planning Department, Cork County Council, Model Business Park, Model Farm Road, Cork.