A glorious year

What a year. From the lows of a frozen spring, to the highs of a golden, gauzy summer that began as suddenly as a light being flicked on, but then glowed for months on end, so that gardeners got to grow dahlia flowers as big as dinner plates, pumpkins the size of beach balls, and heavy trug-loads of fresh fruit and vegetables from the kitchen plot.

Phew.

Because, if I’m being honest, there were moments during that frozen April when I wondered if spring would ever arrive. Moments when the thought of yet another scorching frost and the tedious nightly ritual of swaddling countless young seedlings in layers of insulating fleece made my heart sink. Icy days when I was certain that drills of freshly planted seed potatoes were frozen stone hard in the ground and that young glasshouse-raised tomato plants were so chilled they’d never recover. In that month of record low temperatures, nothing outdoors grew. Lawns froze, spring bulbs that had pushed their snouts above ground stopped dead in their tracks as if under a malevolent spell, and gardeners and farmers began to despair.

And then, quite miraculously, it all came right. Late, yes, but right. Nature corrected itself, and flowers started flowering, blossoms started blossoming and the grass finally began to grow. By early May, visitors to the historic gardens of Kilmacurragh in Co Wicklow were able to enjoy the remarkable sight of its rhododendrons erupting into a great blaze of crimson bloom, albeit several weeks later than usual. In the National Botanic Gardens, the tulip portrait of James Joyce planted the previous autumn finally exploded into colour. All around the country, gardeners finally started digging, sowing and planting, while garden centres and nurseries breathed a deep sigh of relief.

Of course, a spring so exceptionally cold left its mark. In London that month, the famous Chelsea Flower Show simply failed to come to life, despite the fact that it was celebrating its centenary year. The celebrated Swedish landscape architect Ulf Nordfjell’s strangely stiff show garden was the greatest disappointment, but designer Christopher Bradley-Hole got it right with a garden of rare beauty filled with lacy umbellifers, blood-red flowers and multi-stemmed hazels set against a backdrop of charred oak. It should have won best in show, but like a cross old lady, Chelsea was in a strange and sullen mood, and so the prize went elsewhere. Back home in Dublin, where Bloom took place just a week later, the judges were spot on. Waterford-born designer Gerard Mullen’s show garden, which won “Best In Show”, was magnificent – a joyful ode to the wild Irish landscape.

By July, things had got even better, as gardens and gardeners bathed in the sort of heat and sunshine that we hadn’t enjoyed in decades. Slugs, the biggest topic of conversation in previous summers, were nowhere to be seen. Instead, drought, a word that had almost disappeared from the lexicon of Irish meteorologists, was being talked of, and hoses that hadn’t seen the light of day in years were being dusted down. It was that time of the year when the garden normally begins to fade a little, the month when, as writer Vita Sackville-West described it, “everything has become heavy; everything has lost that adolescent look, that look of astonishment at its own youth. The middle-age spread has begun.”

Except that didn’t happen – another bonus of that late cold spring – and instead July was June extended. In the garden, I grew great bucket loads of cut flowers, and picked bowlfuls of raspberries and fat armfuls of jewel-coloured chard. We got to eat ripe strawberries, sniff sweet pea, marvel at the roses, and have picnics where we didn’t need to wear raincoats and carry umbrellas.

August came and went, and the warm days continued. Plants revelled in the heat, while in Helen Dillon’s famous town garden, visitors marvelled at both the luscious beauty and the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk height of the giant, magenta-coloured dahlia “Admiral Rawlings”. Allotments and kitchen gardens around the country filled up with produce; plump trusses of tomatoes, great swags of runner beans, tender heads of sweet corn, golden squash and pumpkins.

And then we held our breath and waited for it all to be whisked away with just one early savage frost. But the weather gods continued to smile and instead we got to enjoy the sort of mellow, burnished autumn that you dream about.

It was a “mast” year, and orchards and hedgerows grew heavy with fruit, nuts and berries. Autumn flower borders filled with copper-coloured heleniums, golden rudbeckias and eupatoriums glowed with colour, while butterflies fed from the nectar. It was so remarkably mild that trees and shrubs only began turning in very late October. When they did, it was with such fiery, extraordinary beauty that you had to marvel at it all.

November? With the exception of a cold spell when my garden was dusted with snow, the mild weather continued. December? It’s not quite over yet, but suffice it to say that just a few days before Christmas I picked an almost ripe straw strawberry from the polytunnel. 2013. What a year.