Welcome to The Paddock! Located just outside Swords, Co. Dublin, surrounded by tilled fields and my partner Daphne’s family, this our garden, a post-pandemic garden that had it’s inception the day the lockdown was announced.
It all started with a vegetable bed, that was documented on social media channels of Johnstown Garden Centre, where I work as Head of Horticulture. As three weeks of restrictions on movement turned into months, the garden grew, the lawn shrunk, and the plant purchases increased. The once acre site is now home to our garden, which includes a football pitch, not a full size one, a trampoline, a big one, and a Pylon, a great big one, but not the biggest.
Plants are central to all that I do in the garden, I try to use plants in combinations to create not just colour, but structure and textural interest throughout the year. In The Patio Garden, the project that followed the first vegetable beds, some specimen plants have been traveling companions of mine from other gardens, plants such as the dwarf Betula albosinensis grown from seed that measures a meagre 1m in height after 14 years, or the Chaenomeles sp. Picked up from the ground as germinating seed inside a fallen fruit on the grounds of the university in Galway over ten years ago, it now cascades bright red flowers from November to March, and three heritage varieties of apple trees purchased from Irish Seed Savers a decade and half past, trained as columns.
Most of the plants have come from my workplace, Johnstown Garden Centre, so I can say that, nearly, everything in the garden is widely commercially available. In my role at work, it is my job to purchase the plants for the garden centre, everything from bedding plants, houseplants, alpines, perennials, shrubs and trees. One eye is always on the lookout for something unusual, something with great flowers, something with fabulous foliage, that I would like in the garden, and that I think other gardeners would like too.
Over the past four years, I have been amazed at how fast the plants have established. I am learning; being surprised by how some plants survive a frost in one area, while the same variety turns to mush in another, defying logic and has me searching for a reason. I am adapting my approach to planting; I am a full-time horticulturist but a part-time gardener, gardening on my days off only, means large areas of the garden have to be relatively low-maintenance. Being surrounded by large tillage fields, the garden is an island for wildlife, practices consider the birds and bees, and all the other creatures. I am compromising; designing a garden with a family in mind, a football pitch: plants close by have to withstand near goal misses as footballs crash into their stems. There is a trampoline, never used, verbally abused by me nearly every day, it’s days are numbered.
Our garden brings us joy all year, even now at the end of January, sitting in The Fire Pit Garden, sheltered from the breeze the fragrance of Daphne flowers wafts across from The Patio Garden from D. ‘Spring Herald’ and adjacent to the vegetable garden D. Bhilua ‘Jacqueline Postil’ adds more scent.
A walk to The Patio Garden has me admiring Hellebores and as I stop to admire the large blooms of Helleborus ‘Cecilia’ I inhale sweet scents of the low growing D. ‘Perfume Princess’, I can see snowdrops bursting into bloom, whil growth shoots of Alliums bring promise of warmer longer days.
In The Pylon Garden, I admire the foliage of Melianthus major, the bicoored blooms of Correa ‘Marion’s Marvel’, and check on the newly planted Cordyline ‘Elerctric Pink’, to see how this pink striped bright leaved clump forming cordyline has come through the recent cold snap, it looks fine
Over the coming months there will be lots to do, lots to see and new plants to buy and plant. A couple of bigger projects to tackle, and I look forward to sharing these with you here.
To see more about The Paddock visit my website: ciaranthegardener.com
Website: www.ciaranthegardener.com
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