Where did the year go , already the end of August but it is a great month in the garden with growth at it’s height if slightly past it’s best and autumn still to look forward to ! I keep coming back to roses which I have said I don’t grow apart from the semi wild rosa rugosa but looking at the photo of Mary O’Donovan from the July piece which mentioned her passing and featured one of her favourite photos that I took in her garden Fairy Hill a few years ago and which I had taken in front of a faourite rose of hers , rosa rubrifolia and […]

The end days of July and after the few weeks drought you can see the garden wilting a bit and in need of a few down pours and we are busy delivering water to pots where even a bucket can revive in hours a shrub in distress . It is Jurassic Park time in the July Garden with the gunnerras ! Garden Visitors from Co. Antrim in Northern Ireland We were away for a period during the first weeks in July and came back to a mountain of work in the garden in order to get it ready for visitors from the Maghera Garden Club from Co. Antrim in Northern […]

There can be no doubt but Irish gardens look their best in June ! The patch of ground at the entrance to the lower garden has been idle since Snezana tackled the Japanese knotweed there two years ago and after clearing I sprayed with round up at three week intervals throughout last year and we seem to have got rid of the knotweed . I have been slowly planting the sloping area with ground cover geranium slips and a few weeks ago decided to tidy up with a small edging of natural rock and I started with five nice pieces and as always with rockeries I let the stones decide […]

The end of May is the best time here in this garden as everything is reaching maturity and is full of fresh growth especially the hostas which are my favourite perennial along with rodgersias and darmera but it is total war out there where the hosta is concerned as from the first time the leaves pop up in early April you have an army of slugs lurking but you have a chance if armed with slug pellets and by choosing big thick leaved plants such as the seiboldiana varieties , Elegans , Halcyon and Francis Williams which the slugs seem to leave alone . I have planted a new variety […]

April in the garden is the last month when you can safely dig up and move trees and shrubs to a new location while it is also the best month to plant new container grown trees and with this in mind I called time on several small specimen oak trees that I put in three years ago and which never really took off , barely stayed alive really so enough is enough , time to be ruthless and out they came . My default trees normally boil down to two choices , silver birch jacquemontii and mountain ash variety Lutescens Moonlight however the lutescens was not available at Clonmel Garden […]

Like me you have probably have had it up to here with Brexit for the past three years as the UK Parliament that up to now historically has been looked up to as the Mother of all Parliaments but which now has shown itself to be stuffed with pompous old farts loving the sound of their own voices unable to make a decision all the while been led by the nose by ten Northern Ireland DUP MP’S who are against anything that might tie them to the South even though the majority of people in NI both protestant and catholic voted to remain in the EU . I am always […]

February is for me always the time when the garden starts to come alive again and we see snow drops , daffodils , crocuses and new growth opening on trees and shrubs and is also the time when hard pruning needs to kick in . We are now back in control of the willows and dogwoods after a really hard pruning that we started two years ago , one that was urgently required as I had let things get out of hand over the past ten years as I really liked the growth but finally came to realise it had gone too far and now I am a born again […]

Because it is winter I am always conscious of how barren a garden can look and have treasured those trees and shrubs with great winter bark and similarly with shrubs with variegated colour leaves however I draw the line at golden leaf varieties which I always think look brassy and one shrub that is an old reliable here in winter is the eleagnus which is evergreen and needs little attention apart from cutting out the pure green leaves as variegated eleagnus will revert back to green if you are not vigilant with the secateurs and eventually take over the entire shrub . I grow three varieties of eleagnus here , […]

December and early January is generally a quiet time in the garden as most people’s attention are on Christmas preparations and sleeping off the New Year excess and of course the weather just after the shortest day of the year is cold , wet  and dark and even the most active of gardeners take some time off ! Traditionally years ago this was the time to look through seed catalogues and order in for the new season and of course those with some disposable wealth can look through outdoor gardening clothing guides and I was reminded of this recently when the Daily Telegraph published it’s annual guide to posh gardening […]

You might wonder what garden flowers can possibly have to do with wars but take the British wearing of the red poppy to remember their war dead from WW 1 or the War of the Roses in England in the 15th century where the House of York wore a white rose and the House of Lancaster a red rose or in Ireland where we remember our Republican dead of 1916 with the Easter Lily . This November marked the 100 year anniversary of the end of World War 1 , on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 . It has always been a […]