Rocky garden place

GARDENS:Gardening in north Clare can be hard graft, but one plantsman's work has created a showpiece

WE WERE IN NORTH Co Clare for a few days recently. It is a gem of a place. At its heart is, of course, the Burren, and its grey limestone is the abiding theme of the area. It knuckles out of the ground through a thin layer of soil, and it is gathered up into the walls that line the roads and flow across the fields. These are some of the most beautiful walls in Ireland, and they are treasured by the people of north Clare. Nearly every house has a carefully built stone boundary, often lined with hawthorn and other sympathetic woody things. There is a welcome respite from leylandii hedges here: I didnt spot any until we crossed the border into a neighbouring county.

Although it is easy on the eye, the stone makes gardening hard, hard work. And no-one knows this better than Carl Wright, whose unexpected tour de force at Caher Bridge, in Fanore, is the hard-won result of wrangling and coaxing the unyielding ground into a garden. In front of his small cottage (which he entirely rebuilt himself), “every planting hole had to be dug with a crowbar”. And there are a lot of holes. There have to be, because Wright is an incorrigible collector. On the half-hectare that he cultivates around his house, he grows thousands of different varieties of plants, including around 200 snowdrops, 150 hostas, 100 daylilies, 60 ferns and 80 or so daffodils. There are many other plant species that he has built up into collections – saxifrages, geums and hellebores, to name a few (and by the time youre reading this, you can probably add another 5 per cent on to all those numbers above).

But despite being a home for a substantial living museum of plant material, the garden, especially at the front, is enchantingly naturalistic. When Wright bought it, the place was enclosed in dense hawthorn, hazel and blackthorn scrub growing in limestone rubble over the Burrens limestone paving. He cleared much of the vegetation between the house and the road, but left a few multi-stemmed, much-coppiced hazels for structure. He rebuilt the drystone wall along the road (one of many walls he constructed on the property) using the rubble underfoot. He brought in several tonnes of soil to give his plants somewhere to put their roots. The new, old-looking, wall and the weather-worn hazels conferred instant maturity on the new garden. North-facing, this part is mostly a spring garden.

At this time of the year, the main event in the front section is an informal pond garden off to the side of the house, next to the river Caher and its sturdy arched 19th-century bridge. Once “just a damp, mucky spot”, it has become, with the help of a mechanical digger that excavated down to the rock, a water garden filled with a congenial mix of natives, including bogbean and marsh marigold, and garden ornamentals. An abundance of wildlife, about which Carl is enthusiastic, is at home here. Wild orchids, several kinds, grow in the nearby grass.

In the further away, and more private part of the garden, which is partially screened from view by a wall with a large moon gate, there are more orchids: not just wild ones, but the covetable Dactyloriza x braunii, only ever seen in the poshest of gardens.

Here, because the ground was sloping, and not suitable for beds and borders, Wright had to take a firmer hand with the landscape, painstakingly wrestling the stone into a series of small terraces. Again, he left key trees to give maturity and to tie the garden into the surrounding environment. The pale, rocky terraces overflow with an elite selection of plants, and ascend from the back of the house until they meet a hazy curtain of native hazel and ash woodland. The entire property extends to about 3.5 hectares, and Wright is sensitively developing and managing most of it as a nature reserve. It is an exceptional garden, dizzying in its plantsmanship, and awe-inspiring in the amount of man energy it has absorbed. You dont need to know a thing about plants to appreciate it, but if you do, you may find yourself in a rocky paradise.

Places to visit

The Burren Perfumery, not just for its delightful scented products, but for its pretty garden, managed by Sarah and Gabriel Casey (burrenperfumery.com)

An Féar Gorta Tea and Garden Rooms, Pier Road, Ballyvaughan, where keen plantswoman Katherine O'Donoghue's remarkable garden nestles into stonework crafted by her husband and sons (065-7077157)

Ballyvoe Garden and Nursery, Doolin. Matt OConnell specialises in cottage-garden type plants, all raised outdoors in challenging conditions, so theyre hardier than many of the mollycoddled plants one buys elsewhere (closed Mondays; 087-9147725). Pop into jeweller Brian Hackett next door, for exquisite pieces with an Irish spirit.

CHARITY GARDEN OPENING

Lorna MacMahon's woodland and water garden at Ardcarraig, Oranswell, Bushypark, Galway is open tomorrow and next Sunday, May 29th, 2-6pm, with plants for sale. Proceeds in aid of Galway Mental Health Association.

Caher Bridge Garden is open by appointment only. Admission: €5. Contact: 065-7076225; caherbridgegarden@gmail.com