AS a small child during the 1930s, Mary White used to collect snails from the box edgings of her mother's fruit and vegetable garden. For every bucketful, she commanded a fee of one penny. Her mother's produce prospered under this regime and regularly carried off first prizes at regional agricultural shows.
Now, in her own garden, Mary grows no fruit or vegetables nor is there a single snail to be seen on the premises. But the first prizes are there for the Bord Failte "best garden in Ireland" and for the National Gardens Association "best garden for all seasons".
And as any gardener knows, making your garden perform throughout the year is no joke. "I can't wait around for things to grow," says the impatient Mary. "I never grow anything from seed and I don't even root a cutting. I go out and buy things." Nevertheless, she toils endlessly. "I never leave the garden, I don't even know the names of the streets in the town!"
The town is Wexford, and the garden is just a few paces from the main Rosslare Road. But you would never know it. Mary's control over her domain is so complete that only pleasing parts of the outside world are allowed to impinge ranks of Scots pines, wild looking fields and tantalising glimpses of sea. Even a massive food factory for which, ironically, her husband Jim is indirectly responsible is screened by a stand of Himalayan birch, eucalyptus and ornamental pear.
Inside the garden, which is crammed with rare and covetable specimens, Mary creates dozens of "pictures" by playing certain plants off each other. Thus, three green spheres of box are placed next to the deeply cut foliage of a purple Japanese maple, while a tall bronze fennel and a Corokia cotoneaster (the wire netting bush) make a filmy backdrop. These are all real look at me plants, but under Mary's strict supervision they knuckle down to some enthusiastic teamwork.
In the same way, she has managed to combine the blood red Bishop of Llandaff with the redfoliaged canna lily and the screamingly red Lobelia cardinalis without causing an uproar somehow, a foil of tall white flowered tobacco keeps them all in line.
The front garden is boldly arranged on one side, trees are allowed to grow freely and loosely, while on the other, in strict counterbalance, a sleek lawn is surrounded by many well groomed specimens. Various conifers are pruned, tweaked and bound (but never gagged) into strong shapes bells, cones and columns. A huge clump of the tall golden oats (Stipa gigantea) holds its feathery heads in front of a sculpted horn beam.
But, despite the numerous brave combinations which are so much Mary's trademark, the garden has a strangely relaxing effect on the visitor. You know that every single inch of it has been carefully composed but, like a stay in a ridiculously expensive, smoothly run, country hotel, it still works its magic. "I like to think of it as a restful garden, where visitors feel refreshed".
And so they do, because around every corner and at the end of each tiny path another intimate tableau is waiting to exert its restorative charms.