October when wet and rainy is not a month I enjoy that much in the garden , leaves everywhere and everything is past it’s best , already signalling that this year’s growth is over but it is a useful time to get started early on the clean up and putting the garden to bed for the winter months . Of course all that pessimism is forgotten on dry days in October when the autumn leaf colour come into it’s own ! This year probably due to the drought in June and July has produced terrific leaf colour in most shrubs but particularly with the rhus cotinus or smoke tree and […]

This September we have been paying for the drought conditions we had during the summer and the weather has been generally cold and wet but growth has been good and as I was away for the first part of the month it has been catch up time with the grass . I use a ride on mower which mulches the grass and doesen’t collect which is great if you are cutting regularly but with any type of longish grass such as I faced when I came back it needs to be cut at a high setting and gradually lowered over the next two cuts , takes patience and as Pat […]

The Garden Open day for the Lion’s Club kept up the tradition of the rain staying away and a great turn out of support for two very deserving local charities with over 180 people paying in on August 12th and raising over a thousand euros . As always a nice blend of visitors who asked interesting questions about the garden , kept us on our toes all day  , many who contributed names to plants and weeds which I could not identify  , mayhem at times with children and dogs running wild but always well behaved ! Again as always the Clonmel Lion’s Club led on the day by Michael […]

I don’t know which is worse for the garden , Hurricane Ophelia last October that blew away trees , the Beast from the East that dropped a ton of snow in two days in February or the recent Kalahari style June and July drought  where trees and shrubs are wilting away under the effects of seven weeks on temperatures in excess of 30 deg and no rain . This heat will kill a lot of plants in Irish and UK gardens and even when the rain returns gardens will not recover and August to November will be disastrous for anyone with an open garden as trees and shrubs will shed […]

Those were the heart felt words of my gardening worker here earlier in June as she did some pruning in the back garden , yeah I know those deer are pretty bold if they hang around the back garden in the day light but anyway it struck me that twenty four or so odd years ago in Macedonia when we first worked together that if I had promised this city girl that if she stuck with me , some day she would be walking in deer shit I think she would have lit out  east and be still running somewhere around Vladivostock today … sometimes you gotta lie !! When […]

This is the first May in over 20 years that I have spent in Ireland and I have been bowled over by the colour and the vibrant greenness and now when asked what is my favourite month in the garden I can answer without doubt that it is May ! Wisteria even though originally from China is forever associated with English gardens and although in flower for only three weeks it is a magnificent climber , new plants are slow to come into flower and will need five years in the ground but the leaves even when not in flower are lovely and if you have a pergola you have […]

I was given a present recently of a fairly mature Acer Griseum , the paper bark maple , which had been potted up each year in a commercial nursery so it had a nice big trunk which was peeling well  already and I planted it today … all maples need a damp soil or at least not dry to grow and more importantly they need shelter so it is a waste of time to stick it in the middle of an open field and expect it to be anything other than a straggly mess struggling to survive  .  That is the problem with a fussy tree like the maple , […]

March has been an awful month here for rain and today certainly does not feel like Easter which I always regard as the time for daffodils and the hope of Summer around the corner … normal weather will it ever come back ?!! This has been the Mother of all winters and rarely has there been a day without heavy rain ,with two major storms , Emma and the Beast from the East in February which dumped what seemed like a ton of snow and Ophelia , our first hurricane ever in Ireland at the end of last October , the garden is saturated and has taken quite a battering […]

Ireland went into lock down for two days ahead of the arrival of Storm Emma and the Beast from the East and the entire country went hysterical and emptied the supermarket shelves everywhere with enough food to last a siege of two weeks instead of two days … an event like this hits us every twenty years or so and we are totally unprepared mentally for it , vanishing indoors for the entire duration and binging on box sets and maltesers ! My friends in the Balkans , where I worked for fourteen years , are left wondering what a group of pussies we are as out there it snows […]

At times such as mid January with rain and icy conditions in the garden it can be difficult to find something to kick off the blog with , a sort of gardening block so to speak and I discussed this once with Jane Powers , best selling author of The Irish Garden and the Sunday Times weekly garden columnist , as to how she coped with the grind of a weekly column to be delivered to a deadline and where does the inspiration come from . Jane was down to earth about it … “ bloody hard ” was how she described it and went on to say that in […]