The Parish (10 page)

We went to the tree nursery of Matthew Neilson, just beyond our parish, and walked through acres of the most wonderful trees. It was a joy to see rows and rows of elegant native trees. A bit like children in a sweet shop, we were spoiled for choice, but with the help of Matthew, who is a wise and experienced tree man, decisions were finally made. The trees were delivered on the last Saturday of the last week of the last October of the old millennium. It was a damp autumn day. Almost the entire parish turned out for the occasion, bringing shovels and spades, and one man brought a digger. It took
hours of digging and dragging the large trees into position before finally they were all standing. By then, we were wet, exhausted and covered in mud but so pleased with our efforts that we could have danced between the trees. Our priest and minister then blessed the grove.

There is nothing more conducive to the feel-good factor than planting even one tree. A whole grove of trees was a feast of delight. These trees would cleanse the air of the pollution from passing traffic and give homes to hosts of wildlife. Surely a blessed event.

“D
id you ever think of opening your garden to the public?” D.J. of our nearby garden centre asked me.

“What!” I gasped. “My garden is not good enough to open to the public.”

“Of course it is,” he insisted. “All people want is just to see someone else’s garden.”

“D.J., I could never get my head around that,” I protested.

“Well, think about it anyway,” he told me. “You’ve an interesting garden.”

If I had an interesting garden, it was not because of anything that I had done: it was simply that I had married into an interesting garden. Uncle Jacky had loved his garden and had created a peaceful haven that I had inherited. His garden had no set lay-out but had paths meandering through flower beds, drills of potatoes and rows of cabbage. His free-range hens scratched industriously wherever the inclination directed them, and our first beehive had sheltered under his apple tree. He would encourage anyone to be a gardener because he exuded his own love of it; his enthusiasm was infectious and he always
had time to lean on his garden spade and have a leisurely chat. To me he was a real gardener because he grew food: he grew potatoes, vegetables, blackcurrants, gooseberries—in fact, almost all the food for Aunty Peg’s kitchen table, and he kept us and some of the neighbours supplied as well. I loved Uncle Jacky and I loved his garden.

When he died, it grieved me to watch his garden grow into a wilderness. Gabriel and I were too bogged down with children and the family business to take care of it. But sometimes late in the evenings after work I would stand at the garden gate and say to the garden and Uncle Jacky: “Some day I will get out here and bring you back to your former glory.” Gabriel kept the grass cut, but apart from that, the shrubs, plants and trees were left to their own devices. The boys had turned the lawn into a football pitch and the dogs thought that it was Shelbourne Park greyhound track. The daffodils and old roses alone survived the neglect, so in spring and summer we still had flowers for picking. In autumn we had a great crop of apples off the tree that Uncle Jacky had planted as a young man. People who plant trees leave a gift for the next generation and at Christmas time I was always grateful to him for his wonderful holly trees.

A garden behind your back door, no matter how neglected, is a blessing that enriches your house and kitchen table. It’s a pity now to see gardens being sold off as sites for second houses and neither house finishes up with a garden. We need gardens to nourish our souls and give us breathing space from each other, and to give children a place to play and let off steam. It is not outside the realms of possibility that in the future houses will be removed to give people back green spaces.

In the end, it was a strange twist of fate that led me back
out into my neglected garden. A retired lady who lived down the river had come to stay with us as she recovered from the death of her husband. It started off as a temporary arrangement, but she stayed with us until she died fourteen years later. The day after her funeral, my sister Frances rang from Kent to find out how we were. I told her that we were somewhat
trína chéile,
and she instructed me to go out and plant a tub in the backyard. Planting, she told me, was good therapy. I did as I was told; one tub led to another, and I discovered that she was right.

Our collie dog, Lady, also found the tubs beneficial, and each night she slept in a different one. Every morning I raged at her beside my tub of flattened flowers. Lady crouched on the ground and covered her head with her two paws and curled up in a ball of mortification. But her act of contrition was not followed by any firm purpose of amendment, and that night she repeated the performance. So I extended my activity into the garden where there was more space, but Lady’s counter-activity continued, and whereas I was on my own, she had her companion Bran to assist her in the nightly uprooting.

Despite Bran and Lady’s efforts I persisted and, if I complained to my sister Phil about the dogs, I was told without sympathy that dogs and gardening did not go together. So, undaunted by canine opposition and football damage, I succumbed to the lure of the garden and discovered that after a day spent there I could dance with happiness. The whole population of Innishannon, it seemed to me then, was perfect, whereas if I had spent the day doing our shop accounts, I could eat thorny wire and snap the nose off anyone who crossed my path. Gardening, I had discovered, was a mental massage.

I became very fussy about garden edging, much to the
amusement of Gabriel who protested, “I’ve cut the grass out here for years and never heard a word about edging, and now all of a sudden it’s all about edging.”

As the years went by, the footballers outgrew the lawn and Lady and Bran went to the burial plot in the grove at the top of the garden. But it was when our friend Con died that I discovered the true value of gardening. He died in January and the following weeks and months I spent working in the garden. Hours of digging eased the pain of grief. It was as if the pain was absorbed into the brown earth. It made me realise that we are deeply connected to the earth and that nature is a powerful silent healer.

So a deep love affair developed between me and Jacky’s garden. I felt that he had left behind him a patch of sacred ground. Though I was full of enthusiasm, I had very little gardening knowledge but became an avid garden-book and magazine reader, and every Saturday I went straight to Charlie Wilkins’ column in the
Irish Examiner
. Margaret Griffin from Dripsey Garden Centre came and set me on the right road, and from there on it was a case of trial and error.

Gabriel and I worked out there together: he was the green-keeper and I was the plants woman. We had defined demarcation lines: the lawns were his and the beds were mine. There was good reason for this strategy as a few years previously I had asked Gabriel to weed Jacky’s grave, which I had turned into a wild flower garden. When I went to see it that evening, the grave was as clean as a whistle with not a flower to be seen.

“What did you do?” I wailed.

“Well, you said to clean it,” he protested.

“But, but …” I began.

“Well, I won’t get that job again,” he said with a grin. He didn’t!

Together we had great days in the garden, and unless it was raining or freezing, we had our lunch out there and the birds got so accustomed to this that they gathered around the table to be fed. The blackbirds became so cheeky that one of them would come on to the table for the crumbs, and if you happened to bring out the tray and had to return to the kitchen, leaving it unattended, the blackbirds had a head start. They had decided that this was their place and it always surprised me that a blackbird could attack and chase away the much bigger crow. But they also bullied the gentler thrushes, who were not as brave, and only when the blackbirds were absent did the thrushes venture out from beneath the hedges. We had put nesting boxes along the high stone garden wall, and one day it amused me to watch a blue tit go from box to box on a tour of inspection. He was house-hunting and not prepared to settle for any old house. At the top of the garden stands the old stone Methodist preaching hall, and the birds burrowed in between the large stones to build their nests; as they flew back and forth, they would put you in mind of a high rise apartment for birds.

We seemed to spend more time in the garden than in the house, and when friends called they invariably finished up in the garden. We were out there when 9/11 happened. Lena, who was home on holidays, got a text from one of her friends in Boston and we came into the house to watch the tragedy unfold.

If there was any upset in our lives, I invariably gravitated to the garden, where I could sit quietly and recover. Gabriel had given me a birthday gift of a garden diary, beautifully
illustrated with quotes and flowers, and I had decided to keep it for recording happy garden thoughts and to write in it only in the garden. So the garden was my healer and comforter, and though I had protested to D.J. that I did not consider my garden good enough to open to the public, there was another factor also at the back of my mind. This was my special place: did I really want to open it to the public? The other side of the equation was that from my garden I could look up at the church steeple which was now wrapped in scaffolding. Refusing to help would be akin to refusing to support a friend with his head enclosed in plaster.

Gabriel had no problem with opening the garden, but then he was always more generous than I was. It was one of the traits that I always loved in him and my miserable side was the element that I liked least about myself. For a few days I struggled with my decision and in the end came down on the side of opening. After all, I concluded, it would require far less work than the other fundraisers for the church. That’s what I thought!

Opening your garden to the public makes you view it in a whole new light. Trojan work is required to bring it up to what you would consider the necessary standard. You could not expect people to come and pay to look at a wilderness. I knew from the experience of garden visiting that gardeners hope to see something different and learn something new. The first garden I had ever visited was that of Brian Cross. That was back in the days of football and dogs in my garden. When I came home, I looked askance at my own wilderness. But that visit gave me motivation, and though I would never achieve Brian Cross’s perfection, it still got me going and in later years, when I revisited his garden, I came home less depressed by my
own.

So began the big effort to dig and prune. Plants that had grown too tall for the front of the border suddenly found themselves demoted to the back benches. Colour co-ordination became a big issue and I began to view my garden as a palette of colour for an oil painting, though I soon discovered that I was no Monet or Mildred Ann Butler. About a week before the opening, I viewed a bed around the base of the elegant silver birch with a critical eye. I began an extensive overhaul and when the whole place resembled a demolition site my young friend Henry called in and viewed it with a jaundiced eye.

“Alice, are you sure that you’re not going backwards?” he wanted to know. As well he might! But by evening all was well and the Johnson’s blue that had lost the run of themselves at the front of the bed were now firmly put in their place in the back row. Some plants, like people, have no manners and would walk all over others if they got away with it. But Henry’s comment had put a stop to my gallop and I decided that I would have to refrain from the big dig.

As luck would have it, I had to go into Cork for a book signing the day before the opening, but all was in readiness—or so I thought. When I came home, my sister Resa was installed in the backyard, surrounded by chaos. The whole place was in disarray as she shifted tubs while water and earth were gushing all over the yard.

“What are you doing?” I cried in dismay.

“This place is too itty bitty,” she declared, rolling a big tub down the yard.

“But Reeees …” I began in protest, but her daughter, my beloved niece Eileen, interjected.

“Alice, come in and we’ll have a cup of tea.”

Inside in the kitchen, over a cup of tea, I regained my equilibrium. We came out and joined Resa in her major overhaul, and when it was done we were all in a state of exhaustion. But the yard did look better.

The previous week I had got a phone call from Ann Cronin, whose son Don is a sculptor living in the parish. She offered a collection of plants for sale, and when they arrived I found that they were very unusual but were all labelled with names and planting instructions. Gardeners love unusual plants at open gardens and she had given us dozens that she had grown herself; I knew the visitors would be delighted with them. In addition, we received raffle prizes from the local garden centres, whose owners were all unstinting in their support.

Before we opened on Saturday morning, Gabriel and I walked around the garden; I felt so proud of it and sensed in my bones that Uncle Jacky would be glad that his garden was looking so well, and opening to make money for the church where he had prayed all his life and beside which he and Aunty Peg now rested. We had put up information details on the interesting points of the garden: the story of the old Wesleyan hall; the site of the village well, and the Churchill path. Winston Churchill’s aunt, Clara Jerome, was married to a Frewen who had previously owned the land behind our house, and down through our garden was a path to the river which Churchill used when he went fishing while staying with his aunt. My favourite corner of the garden was Jacky’s apple tree that provided an umbrella beneath which you could shelter on warm days to read, write or eat.

Over the years, I had collected pieces of statuary, and my favourite was a Portland stone statue of St Joseph that I had
acquired from Glencommeragh, a house belonging to the Rosminians. I was looking for a St Francis of Assisi because with his love of birds he would be ideal for the garden. I had asked Fr Jimmy Brown of Glencommeragh about the possibility of getting a St Francis, but Fr Jimmy had told me that he had none. He asked would I instead settle for Joseph as he was behind the back door waiting for a good home. So, one day we had gone back up to Glencommeragh and brought home Joseph, which was a major undertaking as he was a ferocious weight. On getting him home, our first job had been to strip off his coat of white paint to expose his natural stone, and within a few years he had lost his ghostly white appearance and mellowed into the garden.

My favourite piece of garden furniture was an iron chair made out of horseshoes by a friend of Billy the Blacksmith after Billy had died. Apart from the garden itself, all these bits and pieces added interest to the walk about it.

We were to open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, and we needed to have two people on the gate and two on the raffle table, plus a change of shift every two hours. So, it was a case of “round up the usual suspects”. In every parish you have great people who are willing and able to help out in all situations. They provide the teamwork that keeps the lifeblood pulsing through the veins of any community. The helpers lined up and changed shifts and had great fun between themselves and with the visitors. Even when their turn was over, they walked around the garden, chatting with friends and neighbours. Some people are so generous they would do your heart good.