The Bay Garden

by Bill O'Sullivan

There must be something in the water in Camolin. Either that or there’s a convergence of ley lines there. Whatever it is, something has turned this quiet Co. Wexford town into a gardening hot spot. The area is home to such horticultural attractions as Springmount Garden Centre, which holds one of the widest ranges of plants in the country, and Camolin Potting Shed, a fine nursery profiled in the last issue of Garden Heaven. One of the star attractions is The Bay, a set of gardens within a garden, lovingly developed over the last 17 years by Frances and Iain MacDonald.

When Frances first discovered The Bay in 1989 the nineteenth-century farmhouse was dilapidated and some of the assorted barns, stables and outbuildings were dangerously close to collapse. But Frances saw the potential of the place and, with husband Iain, she braved an uninterested estate agent and less than enthusiastic bank manager to finally make it their home.

They didn’t rush into developing the garden. With an eye to the future, they wisely spent the first year patiently eradicating pernicious perennial weeds, finally sowing a lawn in April 1990 and not planting anything significant until spring of 1992.

The first area to be developed was at the side of the house, right outside the kitchen window. In a house with no dishwasher, there’s no more important view in a garden than the view from the kitchen sink! A cane was positioned in the middle of the view and a perfect circle traced out. Around the edge of this circle beds were cut out of the lawn and filled with mixed planting of small trees, shrubs and perennials. Pride of place goes to a specimen of the Persian Ironwood, Parrotia persica, grown mainly for its stunning autumn colour. It’s planted here to remind Frances of her student days in the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, where she remembers an impressive specimen greeting her at the gate every morning. Nearby is a beautiful grouping of a shrubby silver-leaved Brachyglottis ‘Sunshine’ with the exceptionally free-flowering, lavender blue Aster × frikartii ‘Mönch’ and the Russian sage, Perovskia ‘Blue Spire’. The senecio is pruned hard back to bare wood every year in March, keeping it neat, encouraging fresh silver foliage and preventing its rather weedy-looking yellow flowers.

The gradual spreading of these mixed borders, swallowing up more and more of the lawn, led to this area being christened the Serpentine Garden. It snakes around to the tiny Cottage Garden at the front of the house – a miniature tribute to the white garden at Sissinghurst – and the Rose Garden around the back.

The formal Rose Garden is laid out in a classic box-edged cruciform shape completely surrounded by high hedges of Thuja plicata – a useful alternative to Leylandii that can be pruned back to nothing and still regrows. Each of the four beds has a strict colour theme – white, yellow, pink and red/purple – composed of a mixture of old-fashioned, hybrid tea and modern roses. The central feature is an antique chimney pot surrounded by white cosmos, kept in flower by rigorous deadheading courtesy of Iain’s father, who spends up to half an hour a day on that job alone.

Stepping out from the rose garden you come upon the Hot Border. “Once you’ve seen Helen Dillon’s hot border, you have to have one,” says Frances. The ladybird poppy (Papaver commutatum ‘Ladybird’) is undoubtedly Frances’ favourite plant here – an easily grown splash of annual colour. It mixes perfectly with Rosa ‘Florence May Morse’, a vigorous red floribunda of 2 metres or more. According to Frances, this was the only rose that Christopher Lloyd kept when he famously converted his rose garden at Great Dixter to a subtropical garden – a high recommendation indeed. Other sizzlers in the border include the orange Tiger Lily (Lilium lancifolium), crocosmia in various shades of orange and red, and Ligularia dentata ‘Othello’. However, not all the hot colours in this border are ‘in your face’. The ruddy stems of Drimys lanceolata make a subtle contribution to the scheme.

Opposite the hot border is the Funereal Border, a truly unique feature of The Bay. Variously described by visitors as morbid, gloomy and depressing it is sure to provoke a reaction. The local undertaker even declared it ‘sick’. Asked what inspired her to create such a border, Frances declares, “Well, my mother-in-law is buried in the garden, you know.” And she’s not joking! Iain’s mother’s ashes were indeed scattered in the garden under a tree planted in her memory, but the genesis of this border is more complex. Frances’ all-time favourite plant is the black grass Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’, the blackest of all foliage plants, and it’s this that led her to explore the theme in a border that just happens to hide a miniature pet cemetery.

There are almost no truly black plants, either in foliage or flower, so the border is actually a rather sophisticated concoction of deep purple, chocolate brown and darkest crimson. The foliage plants include Berberis thunbergii f. atropurpurea ‘Helmond Pillar’, Heuchera ‘Obsidian’, Aeonium ‘Zwartkop’ (a tender succulent planted in the garden from June to mid-September), Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Tom Thumb’ and Sambucus Black Lace. The darkest flower is provided by the almost black Viola ‘Molly Sanderson’, supported by Scabiosa atropurpurea ‘Chile Black’, Sweet William ‘Sooty’, Centaurea cyanus ‘Black Ball’, Eupatorium rugosum ‘Chocolate’, Sweet Pea ‘Midnight’ and dark red Dahlia ‘Arabian Night’. Bright sunshine is no friend to this border and, rather fittingly, it’s best viewed on a dull day when the rich depth of the colours can truly be appreciated.

Tucked behind the Funereal Border is the Pond Garden, based on the concept of reflection. Not only are the flower borders reflected in the still water of the formal pool, but they are in fact direct reflections of each other, being planted in perfect symmetry. Every last plant in each border has a twin opposite. The planting here is dominated by silver and blue, picking up on the colours of the old stable block glimpsed beyond the hedge. Powdery blue buddleias, electric blue echinops, purple Verbena bonariensis, silvery erigeron and the glaucous blue foliage of Melianthus major all do their thing here. Everything in this garden room seems to have been designed for restful contemplation, right down to the proportions of the pool, which follow the golden ratio.

The formality of the pond garden appeals to Frances, who classifies herself as a ‘librarian gardener’ – a fan of strict colour palettes, straight lines and symmetry. She credits Iain with an artist’s eye for colour and his masterpiece is surely the Barn Garden, the next stop on the tour. Inspired by Dan Pearson’s work at Home Farm, it is a relaxed affair of naturalistic planting with only a widely meandering river of slate cutting a path through it, forcing you to slow down and take it all in. Every way you look is like a carefully composed painting with delicate, subtle colour combinations, never looking contrived or forced.

This kind of carefree look takes a lot of preparation and planning. The area had been a dumping ground for farm machinery so the ground was compacted and low on fertility. Iain double-dug the ground but didn’t add any manure, the idea being to grow the plants hard, keeping them strong and compact thereby avoiding the need for staking. Five years of intensive propagation was needed, both by seed and division, to amass the 650 plants that it took to fill the garden.

The backbone of the planting is an array of grasses, the dominant one being the upright and early-flowering Calamagrostis × acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, several large clumps of which are dotted throughout the garden. Another upright grass used in repetition is Miscanthis sinensis ‘Ferner Osten’, its red-tinged flowers glistening in the autumn sun. Further vertical emphasis is provided by the crowded deep purple flower spikes of Teucrium hircanicum, the burgundy bottlebrush flowers of Sanguisorba tenuifolia held aloft on wiry stems, and the dark foliage and stems of Actaea simplex Atropurpurea Group.

In contrast to these strong verticals are the flat tops of Achillea ‘Terracotta’ (a dusky orange yarrow), Sedum ‘Herbstfreude’ (a favourite of butterflies that needs to be divided often if it’s not to splay apart on flowering), Echinacea purpurea and E. p. ‘White Swan’ (large purple and greenish white daisies respectively), and Eupatorium purpureum.

Further texture is introduced by the soft, fluffy grasses such as Stipa tenuissima, with Rhus lanceolata erupting through it, and the impossibly airy flowers of Panicum virgatum forming billowing clouds at the edge of the path.

More of Frances’ favourites include Geranium renardii, a great edging plant with foliage resembling skin seen under a microscope, Phlomis russeliana with tiered seedheads like insect apartment blocks, and Serratula seoanei, an attractive late-flowering perennial of wiry habit with purple-tinged, dark green leaves and bright purple flowers in autumn.

The barn that gives the garden its name forms a handsome backdrop, the stone and red brick being picked up in the colours of many of the flowers, but the view in the other direction really captures the imagination with a borrowed landscape of biscuit-coloured fields dotted with bales of hay extending the garden to the horizon.

Visitors are often incredulous when they learn that Iain maintains the garden almost single-handedly. It seems too much for one person, and yet there are plans for further expansion. The current (well-advanced) project is a woodland garden leading down to a bog garden with a wooden boardwalk leading through it to a new arbour. This is one garden that’s going to bear repeat visits for years to come.

From: Garden Heaven, October/November 2006.