When the beaches heave with crowds and the greenways are busy with lines of walkers and cyclists, you can always find peace, serenity and beauty in an open Irish garden. Author and garden expert Shirley Lanigan selects the best lesser-known open gardens to explore this summer …
Dawros Gallery & Garden, Co Kerry
The world is changing and enlightened gardeners like Charlotte Verbeek are among the people making changes. Her four-acre garden in Co Kerry is a haven for nature, rather than a place hampered by it. She developed a blend of modern flower garden alongside a wild wood and bog garden, around the cool modern house, built from the stones of a ruin found on the land. This remarkable organic garden sits comfortably into the wild Kerry landscape.
Contact: Charlotte Verbeek. Tel: 087 6875461. Email: charlotteverbeek@me.com. Open: Strictly by appointment. www.charlotteverbeek.com
Greba Secret Garden, Co Down
There must be a special place in heaven for those who can create a beautiful, sustainable garden from bracken and bramble. Think of a light canopy of ash, beech, birch and lime overhead while you walk, very gingerly, over seas of moss, like the deepest of deep pile green carpet, spiked with little ferns, boulders and dry-stone walls. Beverley and Richard have been working this wonderful wood garden for a quarter of a century. Beverley should get a medal for her stonework.
Address: 31b Carrowdore Road, Greyabbey, Newtownards. Contact: Richard and Beverley Brittain. Tel: (0044 75) 15740517. Email: brittain848@btinternet. Open by appointment, spring to autumn.
Springhill, Co Waterford
The image that remains with me from this garden is a line of Echium candicans, arrayed along the front of a stone outhouse in the courtyard. They started out as chance escapee seedlings from the greenhouse. The house itself is covered in beech, which makes an unusual wall-covering tree. This large garden, with a great selection of unusual, flowering trees, is nevertheless singular in the number and style of its many hedges. Robin is something of a hedge wizard. A whole series of stepped-up and down yew hedges divide long sweeps of meadow and the effect of different lengths of grass and hedging, cut in waves and blocky ledges, is memorable. Close to the house there are extravagantly flowering pond gardens and flower beds stuffed with plants, all of which Ann grew from cuttings. The beds almost climb in the house windows. Ann says that her method of building a border is one of just trying different things. It works.
Woodlands, Faithlegge, Co Waterford. Contact: Robin and Ann Kane. Tel: 0872737165 / 051874503. Open: By appointment to individuals and small groups only. www.rhsi.ie
Green Road Gardens, Co Wexford
The happy chatter from people having visited Irene Kelly’s garden has been a constant in recent years, so it came as no surprise that when I found it, I was smitten. This is a unique place and Irene is a welcoming host. She began here 25 years ago, on a site crammed with Sitka spruce. Today, the garden is made of open meadows, mixed borders, secret garden rooms, wood and stream gardens, all liberally shot through with pieces of art and woven basketry. (Irene is a basket-maker by trade). Do not miss the beautiful cob house she built to store her tools in.
Battlestown, Ramsgrange, New Ross, Co Wexford. Contact: Irene Kelly. Tel: 085 7818821. Open: By appointment to groups on Mondays throughout the summer. www.greenroadgardens.ie
Colclough Walled Garden, Co Wexford
When you know that the Colclough (pronounced Coke-Lee) walled garden is at the far end of a one kilometre walk into the woods at Tintern Abbey, you can relax into that wood walk, until finally, you reach a gate in a wall that leads into this secret walled garden.
It dates to the early 1800s and was until recently lost to overgrowth. In 2010, 30 full-sized spruce trees were taken out and restoration, largely carried out by volunteers, began. The garden is divided into east and west, with a little bridged river running its length. In one section, they play with the vegetable crops: growing them on long raised mounds. Expect to find courgettes under apple trees and cavolo nero kale in the decorative beds.
The flower borders are a joy from early summer to autumn, full of plants donated by gardeners across the country. You will find it hard to believe that the whole operation is completely chemical free. You can also sample the produce at harvest time.
Tintern Abbey, Saltmills, Hook Peninsula, Co Wexford. Contact: Alan Ryan. Tel: 0833064159. Email: colcloughwalledgarden@gmail.com Open: Seven days a week. www.colcloughwalledgarden.com
Glashnacree House and Garden, Co Kerry
Patrick de Nangle’s last garden was a city plot in the centre of London. The leap from a tiny, walled urban space to ten acres of wild paradise must have been a strange one. He arrived with his London plants to a site that had been untended for over a decade. Today it is a remarkable tree fern garden, with rare and unusual specimens as far as the eye can see. His London plants include a monkey puzzle tree that started life on the rooftop garden of Selfridges, and a tree fern rescued from the American Embassy, where it had grown too big for its home. His are trees with stories.
Derryquinn, Sneem, Co Kerry. Contact: Patrick de Nangle. Tel: 087 608 9176. Open, July-October, by appointment to groups. There is also accommodation available on site; www.glashnacreehouseandgardens.ie.
Sea View, Co Donegal
Dorothy Jervis is the fifth generation to work this very romantic old cottage garden. Standing at the front door, the view is simply one of the seas, interrupted by a long, century-old flower border known as ‘Granny’s Bed,’ named for her grandmother. It is full of peonies and roses, salmon-coloured oriental poppies and sprinkles of white hesperis. Dorothy wonders where her grandmother got her plants from at a time when plants did not easily come by. One item in point being Rosa ‘Old Blush China’ also known as the Monthly Rose, which manages to provide her with a bloom for the table on Christmas Day.
Salthill, Mountcharles, Co Donegal. Contact: Dorothy Jervis. Tel: 074 9735350 / 087 913 1393. Email: dorothyjervis@gmail.com. Open: By appointment. www.donegalgardentrail.com
Two Green Shoots – The Garden of Re-Imagination, Co Cork
In the 1940s a lady called Mrs Hardstaft tried to create a garden on this site. She gave up, but the patios and crazy-paved steps and terraces that she made were still here, under bramble and weeds, when Kloë and Adam arrived to garden a few years ago. They have since created their own very personal, unusual garden, where everything grown can be eaten. Wander between edible roses and camassias, whose bulbs, like chestnuts, were eaten by native Americans. There are Irish Babbington’s leeks, along with Chilean guavas, of which they grow five varieties. Calycanthus floridus is a lovely shrub. Here they use its dried bark instead of cinnamon. Sweet woodruff is used for syrups and the berries of mahonia, otherwise called Oregon grapes, are picked to make jelly. Finally, they will go to heaven for the work they are doing to restore what was a dreadful conifer wood plantation.
Glengarriff, Co Cork. Contact: Kloë Wood Lyndorff and Adam Carveth. Tel: 089 708 1099. Email: info@twogreenshoots.com. Open: By appointment only, during the summer months. Special features: There is also accommodation on site, as well as foraging courses; www.twogreenshoots.com.
Medina, Co Dublin
From the nameplate on the wall at the entrance, hidden behind cotoneaster and a stray tree fern frond, to the other side of the entrance, with its exotic tetrapanax, there is no question but that this is a garden that must be visited. The party is so mad, it’s out on the street.
Karl Flynn began working this exotic garden nearly 40 years ago when he first took it on as a typical suburban long stretch of grass. Predictable is not a word that has any place here today.
The main garden behind the house rises steeply up from the building, toward stony, wind-blown, misty Howth summit. It is a rolling show of leaf colour and texture. Tree ferns could not look more at home than in the mist and cloud that regularly descends here over his jungle of mad echiums and unusual trees. The Japanese-inspired area is a covetable concoction of water, gravel, boulders, stepping-stones, acers and rhododendrons, with a bamboo wall and a cedar house. It is not large but you will get lost.
Thormanby Road, Howth, Co Dublin. Contact: Karl Flynn. Tel: 087 7931169. Email: kaflynn@tcd.ie Open: By appointment only, May-August, to small groups. www.rhsi.ie
The Burren Perfumery, Co Clare
Burrowed into the middle of the Burren is this most surprising garden. From the minute you arrive, having driven in on a bouncy bog road, and travelled through the moonscape and karst limestone flats, it feels like something special. The layout is a loose courtyard of stone outhouses covered in rambling roses and backing flower beds full of salvia and poppies. There are little islands of flowers set into wildflower meadows and views out over the bog and limestone pavement. The rest of the garden is enclosed, surrounded by walls and tall hedges of native trees, fruiting hazel, hawthorn, and ash. These shelter the place from the gales. Outside that shelter, the landscape is largely one of wind-shorn fairy bushes and rock. Truly secret.
Carron, Co Clare. Tel: 065 708 9102. Contact: Susan Seager. Email: info@burrenperfumery.com: Perfumery tours available. www.burrenperfumery.com
For more inspiration on visiting open gardens over the summer, read Shirley Lanigan’s newly updated book The Open Gardens of Ireland, The Butter Slip Press, €29, at bookshops nationwide.