PEOPLE who moan about herbaceous borders being hard work get short shift from Christopher Moore. "Herbaceous borders are not hard work I do nothing here all summer long. It gets a good old weed in April or May and a winter manuring after it's been cut down. It's easy peasy"
Indeed. But for most of us, a yearly lugging of 90 bags of mushroom compost through the house is not rated in the easypeasy class.
Nor is all that digging and dividing and wrestling and replanting.
But Christopher Moore is different "I love a garden you can cut down, scrub out and purge of all the nasties during the winter."
Surely no nasties would dare rear their heads in this long and lean just 20 feet wide and quite beautiful garden? And in fact, because Christopher plants them so densely, once the borders begin to burgeon their rightful inhabitants get together and smother any interloping weeds. And what a rowdy bunch they are, this herbaceous crew tumbling onto the neatly mown green aisle which shoots down the garden.
The exuberant tone is set by several mounds of yellow ox-eyes (Buphthalmum salicifolium) their ebullient faces the colour of free range egg yolks. It flowers all summer, it's terribly common, but you don't really see it in people's gardens."
Buttery dollops of evening primrose blossom and tall clumps of feathery golden rod provide more splashes of yellow along the borders. In punchy contrast, clusters of the ornamental onion (Allium sphaerocephalon) wave their tight purple heads on long wiry stems. "The only thing that happened on purpose here was the repetition of certain plants everything else is shoved in and grows up around them."
The "everything else" is an eclectic mixture from teeth gratingly pink lychnis to soft mauve goat's rue from the big, clean panicles of white phlox to the spidery crowns of red bergamot. Fussy rarities such as the palest yellow Nepeta govaniana are head butted by muscular Shasta daisies. These and dozens of other individuals, in every nameable colour form numerous liaisons sometimes quiet and sophisticated sometimes unruly and bumptious along the length of the two facing borders.
But rowdy or not, most of them have come from good homes. My mother, was always very aware of gardens that were disappearing or that had, good collections. Lots of the stuff she was given when she was newly married, I've still got bits of. They came from good places.
Places such as Beech Park in Clonsilla, for many years the home of the Shackletons, and Woodville in Lucan now demolished the home of the painter Letitia Hamilton and her sister.
In the small world that is Ireland it is nice to know the provenance. It's like furniture having a provenance of coming from some house.
When Christopher was a tiny boy he was smitten by the beauty of the walled garden at Woodville and ever since he has hankered after one of his own. "When you walk into a walled garden there is all this sense of security and privacy and heat and containment and architecture. You need this when you're doing something that's escapist. And gardening, unless you are a professional, is an escaping thing. To me, a walled garden is the ultimate.
In the meantime though, Christopher has to make do with his very modest patch in Rathmines. But, as he cheerfully points out. If you lie down horizontally on the path no one can see you. You have complete privacy"