SUMMER GARDENS:Sally Walker, at 93, is one of Ireland's oldest and most eminent women of horticulture, and her Fernhill garden in Sandyford, Co Dublin, is a welcome throwback to the heyday of genteel Irish gardening - and one of the last of its kind, writes Jane Powers.
SALLY WALKER SITS on the wisteria-decked veranda, studying the Loch Ness monster looping up from the shadows under the 200-year-old sweet chestnut tree. The beast in question is actually a fallen branch, but its resemblance to Scotland's most famous mythical creature is uncanny, as it pushes sea-serpent-like through a lake of bluebells.
My visit to Fernhill garden, at the foot of the Dublin Mountains, is instantly richer when Mrs Walker points out why she has insisted that the branch be let lie (or swim) where it is. Her preferred sitting place - well-earned, as she has just turned 93 - gives her a good view of the wooden Nessie.
It also offers her an outlook over a fine bank of heather, now blooming with rice-grain-sized flowers of icy white, pink and mauve, and which she planted with her late husband, Ralph, some 40 years ago. She can see the start of the broadwalk too, with its towering conifers - including three monumental Wellingtonias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) - planted by the Darleys, who owned the historic garden before Ralph's father, Joseph, acquired it in 1934.
She turns her attention to the daisies in the lawn - "so dainty" - and her face lights up: "I remember my first daisy chain. I was born in the Argentine, and we came home in 1920, when I was five, and stopped off in London for a few days. My mother took me off to Kensington Gardens, and made a daisy chain for me."
Mrs Walker is protective of her wildflowers, and cultivates much of the grass at Fernhill as meadow. She is fond of the bird life here too, and her sheltered seat allows her to keep an eye on the comings and goings of a robin, nesting close by in the Californian Carpenteria, a shrub that relishes the reflected warmth of the old house wall.
But don't let me give you the wrong idea about Sally Walker. She loves her birds, bees and wild things, but she is a mean gardener too, with strong opinions, and a venerable knowledge of plants. Latin binomials leap from her lips without hesitation, and complicated plant pedigrees are stored in her brain and pulled out when appropriate: "That's Bergenia Ballawley," she says, of the Irish-bred, elephant-eared plant. "Its parents were delavayii and beesiana. It was originally called Delbees. Desmond Shaw-Smith, who raised it, came up and gave it to me."
Fernhill is filled with plant stories. Many of the trees, shrubs and herbaceous things came as gifts from other great gardeners, whose names are those that occur again and again in the history of Irish horticulture. Frequent visitors to the Walkers' 40-acre patch of parkland, wood, rockery and water garden were Lady Moore, widow of Frederick Moore of the Botanic Gardens; Lady O'Neill, wife of Terence O'Neill, one-time prime minister of Northern Ireland; and Mrs Bell, one of the Smith-Barrys of Fota House.
On this warm May afternoon, Mrs Walker points to two offerings, given decades before: a Mexican Beschorneria yuccoides, with blue-grey strappy foliage and a monstrously thrusting, salmon-pink-and-green inflorescence, which came from Mrs Bell; and Lady O'Neill's Eucalyptus nitens, its silvery leaves throwing glints of light from the nearby wood. The Moores, she remembers, gave "all kinds of things: rhododendrons that wouldn't do for them" - but which are in their element at Fernhill, with its moist acid soil and dappled woodland shade - "and many, many other things. There was so much. If you were invited for tea, there was an iron table there, and there was always a trug and a trowel on it."
In that heyday of genteel Irish gardening, it was the women, more often than not, who passed important plants - Irish cultivars, sought-after rarities, or just the latest thing - to selected friends, and who kept the country's inventory of desirable plant matter in a healthy condition. There were several excellent Irish nurseries at that time, and no gardener would dream of buying a plant and keeping it to herself (actually, to be perfectly honest, one or two would). As soon as it was practicable, a newly acquired specimen was divided, cuttings were taken, or seed was saved. The resulting material, bestowed on friends, wasn't just a gesture of goodwill, but a form of insurance. If the original plant "upped and died", its progeny was safely lodged in a fellow plantperson's garden.
The way we garden today, with everything instantly available, and almost as instantly discarded, was alien to Mrs Walker and her associates. Today's gardens are also foreign to her. At Fernhill, the kitchen garden, laid out more than 180 years ago, and known to her just as "the garden", is "a typical Irish country garden", like those she grew up with in Co Cork. "That would have been like my grandmother's garden, with the fruit, vegetables and flowers. So many of these gardens that are now open to the public, they've done away with that."
And indeed, when you walk into the space in question, which is enclosed by tall beech hedges, you enter a place that is of another time, where a kind of haziness prevails, where the air is more still, where bees buzz more loudly, and birds sing with more conviction. The roar of traffic servicing the several new estates nearby recedes into the background. Clematis and roses envelop pergolas and fences built from rough poles, herbaceous plants sprawl over the gravelled paths, and old-fashioned peonies unfold their talcum-powder-scented petals. Apple and pear trees, fruit bushes and vegetables are mixed in with the ornamental stuff, while a grid of box hedges - lime-green with new growth and smelling characteristically of old cats - attempts to impose some order on the profusion. There are few gardens such as this left in Ireland.
There are also few where the principle of naturalistic planting is carried out with such success, especially in the woodland areas. One of the most appealing of these is the so-called "tennis court", although no tennis has been played here in more than 50 years, as the ground is far too soggy for balls to bounce with any vigour.
So, instead of tennis rackets, lemonade and plimsolls, this plot is furnished with moisture-loving woodlanders: pink primulas dusted with powdery farina; three-petalled, creamy-white trilliums; at least three kinds of dicentra, in mauve, pink and white, and pure white; and the exquisite royal-blue-and-baby-blue Omphalodes Starry Eyes, an Irish cultivar that arose in a Rathfarnham garden. White-flowered honesty explodes here and there in clouds of chalky petals. There are many other white-flowered plants here, and in the rest of the woodland, lighting up the ground with their blooms. The native wild garlic or ramsons (Allium ursinum) makes a snowy carpet under some trees, while a white form of the Spanish bluebell rises out of its midst, and nods approvingly.
Also in Fernhill are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of rhododendrons. There is at least one variety in flower over nine months of the year, emphasises Sally Walker, even though "Dublin people think that rhododendrons flower only in May, because of the ones in Howth". They range from delicate, dwarf varieties to giants, tens of metres tall, and bedecked with thousands of blossoms. One of the finest, which was given to the previous owners, the Darleys, in the middle of the 19th century, by David Moore of the Botanic Gardens, is Fernhill Silver. It was named for this garden, and for the silver backs to the leaves. According to Mrs Walker, David Moore's son, Frederick, would raise his hat to it when he was visiting the Walkers.
I raise my hat to it too, and to all the other historic plants in this unique garden. And I salute the indomitable Sally Walker, one of Ireland's oldest and most eminent women of horticulture. A final salutation goes to Dublin businessman David Arnold, who recently bought Fernhill - although the Walkers still remain in residence. He has undertaken to maintain the gardens and keep them open, which means that this green Dublin gem is safe for the foreseeable future.
Fernhill is open on Tuesdays to Saturdays and bank holidays; and on Sundays. Admission €5. The garden entrance is 10km south of the city centre on the Enniskerry Road (R117)
PHOTOGRAPHS JANE POWERS, JONATHAN HESSION