Paddy Tobin, An Irish Gardener
Our garden, gardens visited, occasional thoughts and book reviews
In ancient Rome, a genius loci was the spirit which protected a place, a territorial guardian angel of sorts. Nowadays, it is a phrase used in reference to garden design and was first enunciated by Alexander Pope. He contended that garden or landscape designs must always be adopted to the location for which they are … Continue reading Genius loci
This project at Mount Congreve Gardens was started only last year so it was both a surprise and a huge delight so see it is an immediate success and has already made a huge and beautiful impact on this area of the garden. I had expected it to take a few years to develop but … Continue reading A Snowdrop and Hellebore Extravaganza
A blast from the past: photographs of visits to Helen and Val Dillon's garden in 2003/4/5, came up unexpectedly today. A publication has asked me for photographs of another garden and the search took me to an old external hard drive with photographs dating back to my first digital camera. Browsing such collections inevitably leads … Continue reading The Dillon Garden 2003/4/5
Of course, I have been dramatic with the title but there are occasions when small interludes can feel like just that, a great escape. We had days of the most miserable weather; days when we not only had incessant rain but rain accompanied by bitingly cold wind. There were days of being confined to the … Continue reading The Great Escape!
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 … Continue reading The Excluding Eye – A Visit to The Garden House, Devon.
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 … Continue reading Mount Usher
On retirement, my late friend, John Riley, spend some time in Devon before moving to Ireland. John was an East-End boy, of Irish parentage, and there were regular recollections of his evacuation during the Second World War, of summers with his mother hop-picking in Kent, of his days in the Posts and Telegraphs, of fishing … Continue reading Marwood Hill Garden
The Ackland family purchased the Killerton estate (2,590 hectares/6,400 acres) in the early 1600s and passed it to the National Trust in 1944. On visiting today, one sees an extensive designed landscape with a comparatively small ornamental garden close to the house. It was John Veitch, of the famous Veitch Nursery family, who laid out … Continue reading Killerton House
There is a tremendous sense of space, of openness, of great skies and distant views at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales. Shortly after entering the gardens one comes to a circular pond with fountain, fed by a meandering rill which has run downhill for over 100 metres. The temptation is to follow the rill … Continue reading The National Botanic Gardens of Wales
The National Garden Scheme provides a wonderful resource - either online or through their Yellow Book - to garden visitors to the United Kingdom. Before any visit to the U.K. I check the online listings of NGS gardens open in the area we are visiting. These can be extraordinarily interesting gardens and very often gardens … Continue reading The National Garden Scheme at Little Ash Bungalow.
