RUBEL Ross and her husband, John, have a particularly urgent reason for keeping their domain in good order. Their garden was created at the beginning of the century by a pair of Edwardian ladies, the Misses May. Before she died, the elder Miss May declared she would haunt anyone who lived in the house if they didn't look after the garden. "So we have to be on our toes," says Rubel Ross.
Ghostly threats aside, the Rosses are completely devoted to the legacy of the Misses May - which is just as well, as it is a colossal, labour-intensive three acres of lawns, borders, ponds, dry-wall terraces and a "Robinsonian" wild garden. When they arrived thirty-some years ago, Rubel and John began the work of prising the garden from the embrace of nature, into which it had gradually slipped after the Mays' half-century tenure ended in 1945.
The wild garden, which has a run of trickling pools, had lapsed into a jungle of tall bamboo. After "cutting and cutting and cutting" back the bamboo, they were finally able to liberate the pools. Now Solomon's seal, lady's mantle and ferns curl around the water, while olive-green newts disport themselves in the mud. Nearby, an enormous hoheria is covered in white, starry blossom and a May-blooming snowdrop tree (Halesia monticola) has bright, clean green leaves: "I don't like to lay down the law," says Rubel, "but I don't know of a larger one in Ireland. Everything grows huge here for some reason." Perhaps the reason is that much of the garden is in a great sheltered dip where every ray of sunshine is milked to the maximum. One side of this miniature valley is spectacularly lined with warm, amber coloured terraces built from stone quarried next to the Dargle, which runs just beyond the Rosses' boundary. "Two years ago", says John, "this was a mass of ivy. You wouldn't have known there was any rock under it." Rubel has planted the walls with little, hardy geraniums and other dry-wall plants, but not too many, because these are stones with character, and they demand to be seen.
Also clamouring for attention is John's latest gift to his wife: an ornamental vegetable garden, where bold geometric beds are filled with red-stemmed ruby chard, spinach, peas, beans, spuds, leeks and beetroot. Fed on manure donated by the cows who live in the front field, the vegetables are taut with rude health. A flat-topped, stone mushroom serves not just as a central focal point, but also as a handy resting place for trowels and trugs which otherwise play hide-and-seek amongst the food plants. A fat box hedge wobbles along beside the potager, like an outsize, dark-green caterpillar. It is John's job to trim it, "I call him and edge-and-hedge gardener," says Rubel.
But when he's not edging or hedging, John retreats into the wood that surrounds the garden. Here, where wonderful oak, beech, wild cherry, hazel, holly and birch grow, John's mission is to give the more beautiful trees room to breathe by judicious pruning and culling. Here and there he opens windows of light in the wood, so that unexpected bursts of sunshine zap into the green space.
Rubel, meanwhile, toils away in the herbaceous border, at this time of the year spangled with tall white and pink Japanese anemones and pale-blue scabious. It'll be some weeks before she lays down her tools: "We never go away in the summer; we always have to be here for the garden. Really, it has to be one's career."
And surely that is good news to the late Miss May, spared the trouble of rousing herself from her eternal sleep?