Judging the Garden Judges

by Jane Powers

You have to be a brave sort of person to open your garden to the public, to let unknown visitors trawl through your borders and beds looking for weeds, to let fastidious folk loose on your lawn, to put your gardening skills up for critical inspection.

Frances MacDonald is especially brave, because when she lets people onto her patch each summer, it holds a special interest: she is a judge in the Shamrock AlI-Ireland Gardens Competition, the most fiercely-fought gardening contest on this island. I'm relieved to report that her weeds are few and far between, and her lawn edges are perfect. Or perhaps that should read "his lawn edges", because Frances takes no credit for the garden. "Iain does all the work," she claims, referring to her husband. "People just assume it's mine because I'm the loudmouth. I inspire and encourage - and criticise," she explains, while Iain stands by silently.

But whatever the dynamics of this gardening duo - who run a design and landscaping business together - they certainly work. The three-acre plot, wrapped around a 19th century farmhouse in Camolin, Co Wexford, is a perfect model of how to create an appealing country garden from a blank canvas. And, because parts of the garden are still developing, it's especially interesting, as you can see the bones becoming slowly fleshed out with plants and landscaping. It's both educational and optimism-inducing to observe that a beautiful garden has to grow, that it doesn't just exist (like our older,grander gardens seem to) or miraculously appear from nowhere (like a hey-presto television garden).

The MacDonalds came to this place just over 10 years ago: "I always wanted to live in the country, but with a bus going by that says 'Dublin' on the front. And that's what we've got!" says Frances. There was not much here then besides some mature beech, ash and apple trees, and a holly in front or the house: "Lots of old houses and cottages have a big old holly - horrible old gangly hollies that don't have any berries on. It was meant to protect your house from lightning, but ours didn't stop our roof being blown off."

Now, the holly has been joined by a thick hornbeam-and-laurel hedge that hides the tiny front garden from the traffic that courses past on the busy main road. "This is the postman's garden; he is the only one that sees it," says Frances, of the intimate, enclosed space dominated by a huge plum pudding of box: "Isn't it lovely? Birds nest in it." The box dome is surrounded by white-flowered plants - the Japanese anemone 'Honorine Jobert', white bergenia, double feverfew, the 19th-century shrub rose 'Blanc Double de Coubert", and the big fried eggs of Romneya coulteri - a colour scheme inspired by Vita Sackville-West's famous garden at Sissinghurst, in Kent.

Around the corner in a purple-dominated patio area, there's another homage to Sissinghurst, with Vitis vinifera "Purpurea" and Clematis "Perle d'Azur" scaling the wall together - a combination that Frances borrowed from the Kent garden. The vine produces small grapes each year. "Can you eat them?" I inquire. "If you were desperate," comes the reply. We turn our attention instead to the delicious fragrance emanating from a pot of dark-blue and purple sweet pea, "Matucana". It is an ancient variety introduced into Britain in 1699 by Franciscus Cupani, a Sicilian monk (and available from both Thompson & Morgan and Unwins Seeds - under the name of "Original Sweet Pea" from the latter company).

Beyond the purple-enfolded patio the garden unrolls into a vast, green lawn (with those perfect edges) that flows around curving beds of mature shrubs and perennials all planted since 1992. "It was just a lumpy bumpy load of soil when we came." Further on, a small rose garden is packaged inside an evergreen, coniferous hedge: "This is not Leylandii!" asserts Frances before I have time to even think it might be. "It's Thuja plicata. You can clip it back to nothing and it regrows."

The Funereal Border (which I've been dying to see, as it were) is next, a sombre mingling of dark plants: black hollyhock and viola, the mourning widow geranium (G. phaeum), Scabiosa "Ace of Spades", black mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus "Nigrescens"), and a cortege of other melancholy vegetation. It is nicely offset by the Hot Border of screaming red and flame-flowered plants (the area was dubbed "death and hell" by a party of French gardeners).

Last year's project was to create a yew-enveloped pond garden, with silvery and blue planting lining the perimeter. Each side is an exact mirror image of the other, down to the last plant. Catmint, white lychnis, lambs-ears, wormwood, campanula, white dianthus; every individual has a mate on the other side.

More and more plans are afoot, to be carried out during the quiet months when the garden is closed. Frances never stops scheming, even as Iain is working on the current endeavour: "I have ideas while he's doing it," she says, "And then we change it - and then we have a fight." This all sounds terribly familiar, and oddly comforting too. It's nice to know that those who sit in judgement are also human beings.

From: Irish Times, Saturday August 5th 2000