LIKE all the best magicians, Rod Alston can make you believe in things which you cannot see. Stand with him in the collection of twenty something acres in Co Leitrim which they have grandly christened as the Organic Centre and, despite the paucity of evidence, you don't doubt for a minute that his vision of a unique centre offering education and entertainment for gardeners and growers and each and every one of us, will soon be a reality.
There may be little more in the site at Straud right now than a few wooden buildings and a collection of tunnels, but anyone with a sufficient cast of mind will think back 20 or more years, when Alston first came to Leitrim, and established Eden Plants at Rossinver, a few miles up the road from the Organic Centre. He has described the scenario himself: "In February 1975 I moved into an almost derelict cottage, surrounded by the absurdly optimistic nodding yellowness of daffodils, and a chaos of thorn and bramble. I came with the necessary ignorance and naivity and possessed, I suppose, a sufficiently stubborn twist of mind to remain here. During the 20 years I have attempted to make a garden that is both productive and beautiful, and a farm that is capable of supporting those living here."
What Rod Alston has achieved with Eden Plants is quite simple: he is the single greatest grower of herbs and vegetables in the country. His skills as a horticulturist are phenomenal. Touring his tunnels at Eden, one marvels at the vigour, the beauty, of everything to which he turns his hand, from sweet choisum to the simplest thyme plant. His butterhead lettuces, for example, are so jade green and lush that they have all the opulent luxuriance of a Hermes scarf: they are voluptuous, dazzling.
"We're all the time trying to get a better understanding of a plant's needs," he says, simply. "And then looking after the soil. We get plenty of failures. But we identify with what we are doing, so if quality is low, that's like saying `I'm not much good'. I don't want to be `not much good'!"
But skill alone doesn't explain the mark of Rod Alston. Throughout his career he has been a pioneer, first establishing Eden and its teaching courses, establishing his herb delivery service, working for the organic organisations, establishing the CoOp shop in Manorhamilton, producing, many moons ago, the fine North Leitrim Vegetable Growers' Cookbook and, latterly, overcoming one of the traditional shortfalls of organic growing, and successfully producing crops all year round. He explains this latest move quite simply.
"The biggest secret is being determined to do it, because the easiest thing for a grower to say is `Okay, December to March is my holiday'. But I suppose I'm driven also by guilt: if you persuade someone to eat your produce and then say. `Sorry, nothing for two or three months', that doesn't seem right. And then it's a matter of looking for the right sorts of things, to grow and the correct way of growing them.
As Mr Alston has rung the changes over the years, he has seen a quantum leap in terms of people's willingness to try different foods. "Fifteen or 16 years ago, we trekked around the restaurants with cut herbs, fresh herbs, to see if they would buy them, and nobody was interested. Now, every year we have more and more restaurants ringing us to ask us to supply fresh herbs."
This change has been provoked by the work of people like Rod Alston, and their utterly dogged determination to maintain quality. Despite requests from far and wide, he continues deliberately to mine only a local trade, resisting the temptation to expand Eden. "We have developed on the philosophical basis that small is beautiful, aiming at quality, which is quality in a business relationship as well, and if you are small you can respond. I think you can still have quality in a larger scale, but it's a different sort of quality."
Perhaps what explains the success of Rod Alston's work is his ability to see the connecting thread that holds everything together in terms of growing, cooking and eating. "Whenever I'm giving a talk on gardening I can never totally split it off from cooking. And it's the only area where most people have room for creativity and the satisfaction that comes from creativity. Which means that it's so sad when you see somebody with a standard garden with the six or seven species you get in every garden centre, or producing a standard meal."
THE next step of the thread, now, is the Organic Centre. It may seem to some to be a great folly - the idea of a pioneering education entre in the middle of nowhere special. But Rod Alston is comfortable with the idea of follies. As he wrote himself a few years back: "Often times Eden Plants seems to me to be some sort of extreme late 20th century folly. But follies have their place.
"What will happen," he sketches confidently with his hands as we stand in the fields, "is as you come in there will be a car park, behind those willows which will create a screen so you won't see the cars at all. The building which includes administrative offices, a library, teaching rooms, a small cafe, a shop, will be mainly on the other side of that ditch. Then we go on down, past a reed bed effluent system to the river, and the main outdoor vegetable area will be there.
"This is a model back garden, and the idea is that it should be of interest to absolutely anybody, and possibly provoke ideas for somebody in their own garden.
"It started from scratch last summer, with a four course vegetable rotation area in the centre, designed to produce plenty to support an average family. The two beds here are herbs, almost all of them functional herbs which might be used in the house, but also used as an ornamental garden.
"The centre is very much aiming to have something to demonstrate and to say to anybody at any level, whether it is a consumer who wants to understand the politics of growing, what the implications are in buying this food instead of that food, this method of production instead of that method of production. For the amateur gardener, to stimulate with ideas, with different ways of producing or growing organically, and up to the person who wants to produce commercially, on a small scale or a larger scale. I think it will be unique. I don't think there is any centre in the world, as far as I know, that tries to do that. I think it will work.
With Rod Alston behind it, we have no need to doubt that for a second.