A Wet Day with Beautiful Flowers.

The good weather of earlier in the week has gone. That bright crispness and that sharp coolness in the air have given way to dullness, mistiness, clamminess and a general feeling of misery and no opportunity to garden. Were it tomorrow, November 1st, I could make a timelier quotation of Thomas Hood’s poem, “November” but, …

The Day Comes!

The day comes! We all wish the summer, even the autumn, show to continue in the garden as long as possible and we treasure those plants which bring colour to this late end of the year. However, as the weather becomes worse - and in Ireland this means wetter and wetter - the day comes …

Falling in Love Again

I am the most unmusical of men but lyrics from years past come regularly into my head and are parroted, most likely in an inaccurate form, all day long. This dreadfully annoys my poor wife and would annoy our youngest son all the more were he at home for both are sticklers for accuracy in …

The Excluding Eye – A Visit to The Garden House, Devon.

Why do we seek beauty and prettiness and exclude the unappealing, distasteful or unattractive when we photograph a garden? I have just looked back over an album of shots from a visit to The Garden House in Devon and find the photographs strongly contradict my thoughts and impressions of the garden on the day. They …

Will You Look at the Limelight!

So she said as we sat drinking our breakfast coffee while watching the morning news on television. At that hour of the day “limelight” was a word that left my poor not-so-fast-early-in-the-morning brain puzzled; it certainly wasn’t clear to me what Mary had in mind. She’s used to that vacant, lost look on my face …

Mount Usher

Mount Usher, in Ashford, Co. Wicklow is one of my favourite gardens and, indeed, it has regularly polled as one of Ireland's top visitor attractions and has often been described as Ireland's most romantic garden. It is very much an Irish garden, a garden of softness and naturalness, a garden which lies at ease in …

The Meadows at Gortlecka Crossroads

Meadows are in! Meadows are the latest garden must-have. We have looked with a little envy at the gardens created by the likes of Piet Oudolf and have been frustrated that such plantings do not do well in our wetter climate. His plantings look wonderful in the crisp, dry, frosty weather of the continent but …

The Hazel Wood

The Song of Wandering Aengus I went out to the hazel wood,   Because a fire was in my head,   And cut and peeled a hazel wand,   And hooked a berry to a thread;   And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out,   I dropped the berry in a stream   And …

World Mental Health Day

I'm fine!  

That Time of Ease

The rush of the summer is over; autumn has moved along gently and winter is not quite upon us. It is a time of ease in the garden. That rush of growth is gone - and, thankfully, that applies also to the weeds, the grass and the hedges - so routine maintenance is much less …