I was in London recently and my sister Ger , arranged a guided tour of Buckingham Palace … the rumbling sound you hear now is my Father’s spirit at the thought that anybody related to him would go anywhere near the Royal residence unless carrying an explosive device … the tour took four hours and was interesting just to see how they live but more interesting for me was the fact that at the end we got to walk a half a mile through the garden . Not the Royal Family’s private gardens mind you just basically a walk inside the royal grounds along the lake to the gates  , […]

The planting area in the new patio in the Lower Garden is thickening up nicely since I started it last February and although the soil is not great I am picking plants that don’t need pampering and don’t mind stony soil . Mostly the plants are self seeders transplanted from other parts of the garden , bergenias , alchemis molis , ground cover geraniums and lots of vinca dug out in Spring , both the green and the variegated type and of course the main work was in hands and knees work ,weeding the area from the beginning by hand to allow the new plants a good start and now […]

Just this winter a nice peach tree died having got too much ground water due to the severe flooding and left the problem of what to do with the large hole in the shrubbery … I cut the now dead branches to a compact shape and planted a climbing rose to use the skeleton tree as a support … still looked pretty bleak so out came the trusty pot of Majorelle blue paint and I think it looks great and provokes a smile  when you see it ! When a mature tree just ups and dies it invokes discussion on how this could happen and there can be a variety […]

June has to be the nicest month in the garden especially in our climate with everything at it’s best , every shrub and tree in full leaf , fresh with it’s best coat on bursting with growth and although I hate to admit it , it is downhill from now to November and although it still looks good it starts looking tired and never as vibrant as it is now and of course at mid summer there is light until 11 pm … magical ! In June trees and shrubs reach their peak growing condition which is why it is also the favourite month for visits to gardens , after […]

I spent a few weeks in May this year  tweaking a design for an extension to a garden on the Adriatic Coast in Croatia which I had set out last September  2015 for the builders . The garden is owned by a friend and I built it from scratch twelve years ago and have planted and monitored it on a twice yearly basis since . All the plants , trees and shrubs are Mediterranean so are selected to cope with the extremely hot dry summers , it started out as a small garden which I planted with a mimosa tree for height and the plants are jammed in to both […]

Late April and early May are magical times in a garden , everything is fresh and about to come into full growth while the late flowering spring bulbs are still in bloom . Christopher Llyod , the best garden writer of the 20th century , used to call certain plants , garden thugs , for their talent for spreading seed everywhere and their sheer ability to survive against all our best efforts as gardeners to contain them . I love garden thugs and how they self seed into every corner and I always take it as a compliment that the plant likes the conditions we have provided so much that […]

April is for me the most exciting month in the garden , winter is finally over and new growth and the first flowers of our native plants are coming into bloom and for me the best of these is our common wall flower which not only is great to look at but the smell of a wall flower is unique and transports me back to ten years of age and an old fashioned cottage garden my Grandmother Nonie had created in Ballintaw , West Limerick , where I spent most of my summers in the 1950’s . Nonie also grew roses but they never registered in my mind like the […]

Some plants like old loves stay in the memory forever and one plant that certainly has been with me for over thirty five years is the giant gunnera and is one of the first architectural foliage plants I think of for any wet land planting scheme . Mostly gunnera is too big for small gardens unless you build a corner planting around it and the big drawback is that when it dies back in late November it leaves a gigantic hole in the border and I solve that problem in this garden by mainly having it as a waterside plant where the gap is not as noticeable and of course […]

I received a lot of response in the last blog to the photographs from my time in Bosnia , a wonderful country where I worked for ten years from 1996 to 2005 and whose culture , history and people I loved and continue to love to this day . I drove into Bosnia for the first time on March 5th 1996 from Belgrade  just weeks after the war had ended , crossing the Drina river border between Serbia and Bosnia at Zvornik . The next fifty miles took me through the front lines with burnt out tanks and devastated villages and towns all along the road , it was seven […]

The garden is ten year’s in existence in 2016 and started life on January 6th 2006 when I drew out on the ground the outline of the design with  garden hose for the immediate back garden constantly viewing it from an upstairs window until I got the curving design I wanted for the new lawn just right… happy innocent days ! And a view ten years later in 2015 I had just arrived back in Ireland after thirteen years working in the Balkans and my final posting with the EU in Sarajevo . I left Sarajevo at 6 am on a snowy bitterly cold Saturday morning on the 19th December […]