The Occasional Gardener: Imagine a young boy who sleeps in a shed and wakes up every few hours to stoke the fire - not to keep a family warm but to make sure that the melons and peaches in the greenhouse aren't getting cold.
Imagine a garden where a knock on the big wooden entrance means all the gardeners must disappear - because the owners want to stroll around without the "eyesore" of the people who do all the work. And imagine having 15 gardeners to grow your cut flowers, fruit and vegetables and maintain a six-acre walled pleasure garden full of exotic species from around the world.
I'm not a huge fan of stately homes - all that shuffling along rope barriers trying to summon up interest in dusty antiques and bad portraits of ugly people (or ugly portraits of bad people) is exhausting - but a recent tour of Strokestown Park in Co Roscommon made me rethink my prejudice. A house and garden are much more than bricks and plants and what makes Strokestown Park fascinating is the people who lived there - upstairs, downstairs and in the garden shed. One telling detail is the tunnel for servants, so they could walk from the stables to their living quarters without being seen from the big house.
The estate was owned by the Mahon family - infamous for evictions and the forced emigration of thousands of tenants in coffin ships during the Great Famine - until 1976 when Jim Callery, a local garage owner, bought it. Callery had planned to sell off most of the estate but when he came across a letter written in 1846 by tenants pleading for some poor relief, he recognised Strokestown's historical significance and bravely decided to create a Famine Museum and restore the house and its grounds.
Just a few years ago, the gardens were invisible - veiled by an invasion of brambles and trees - but now they're beautifully landscaped. I often feel overwhelmed by the amount of work facing me in my own weed-engulfed garden and it's inspiring to see places transformed against all the odds.
Strokestown reminds me of the atmospheric restoration achieved at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall: you can almost see and hear the ghosts of gardeners cleaning tools in the old potting sheds or carefully storing produce ready for the master of the house to inspect. Now the fruit and vegetable gardens grow varieties from the 18th century (like sweet yellow currants and tree onions) and the glasshouses where peaches, melons and grapes were first grown in 1780 are in use again - the only difference is that the gardeners don't use the chemicals which their predecessors depended on.
The pleasure garden doesn't claim to be a faithful recreation so it can develop to appeal to our 21st-century tastes. The basic layout of paths, hedges and beds is quite formal, but the planting is more modern and feels very informal in places - there's even a wildflower meadow. Despite this, the voices of the privileged few seem to echo around the grass tennis court, the croquet lawn and the wooden summer house, which is decorated with a sepia photo of a stern governess minding a bored child: Olive Mahon, who was the last of the family to live on the estate. Some plants have been here for over 100 years - such as the ginko biloba tree and the fig tree reputed to have come as a slip from the gardens of Gethsemne.
One of the highlights is the massed colour of the herbaceous border, believed to be the longest in Ireland and the UK. Inspired by the queen of borders, Gertrude Jeckyll, it looks its best at this time of year. Like any garden, it pays to see it at different times of the year - I'm already looking forward to going back in late September to see the glowing autumnal colours of the beech hedge and trees.
Unlike many visitor attractions, Strokestown sells things which are actually useful. My souvenirs were a book on the famine and a bag of freshly-dug (blight-free) potatoes - which were among the best I've ever tasted.
Strokestown Park, Co Roscommon is open every day in the summer. Tel: 071-9633013 or www.strokestownpark.ie
