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 …