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 […]

I always feel the garden is dreary in December , the old leaves are still hanging on the trees and clogging up the ground and while normally I would be on top of this with the leaf blower however this December I am on crutches for a few weeks recovering from a hip problem so am more conscious of not being able to actually do a clean up … depressing ! December in Ireland has been full of unusual rain , heavy persistent H2 O bucketing down on a daily basis and the poor people in the west of the country have had an almost biblical Noah’s Ark flooding . […]

A Walk in the Garden earlier this morning . Gardens never stand still and constantly evolve be it through neglect where the garden just reverts to an overgrown jungle or just changed over the years as the owner or owners hand it on or if the property changes hands . In the case of famous gardens which are created like  in the UK say Hidcote in the early 1920’s  or Sissinghurst in the 1940’s and which then are taken over by the National Trust and remain continually open to the public , a decision has to be taken as to whether to continue with the style of their famous owners […]

Late October is the month all the garden writers say we should enjoy for the berries and the autumn colours … it is the time of long nights drawing in , smoke from open fires and the clocks going back at Halloween … well they would say that wouldn’t they as they have copy to fill for editors and don’t write anything depressing etc !! Well for me I walk around the garden and along with the great autumnal colour I also see death with the plants hunkering down in advance of the harsh winter winds and knowing we are looking at below zero temperatures and realising that the optimism […]

The September 2015 issue of The Irish Garden featured a six page illustrated article on the garden written by Shirley Lannigan and needless to say we were thrilled to see it publishe. We had known of course for some time that  Gerry Daly as editor of the magazine had it in mind but nothing was definite even after Shirley came to the garden in July and interviewed Snezana and myself nor indeed were we given any advance notice until a friend rang early on the morning of August 21st  to say the September issue of The Irish Garden was in the shops and Petrovska garden was in it ! After […]