In the Garden

Spring was late coming to Ireland this year. This was a blessing for our brilliant gardeners Sarah and Gay as we had diverted their attentions away from the Herb Garden into various structural projects around the Perfumery.

These were all finished (more or less!) before Easter, and then it was all hands on deck to get ahead of the weeding before it got out of control. Pots of tulips brightened the garden areas in advance of the first garden flowers.

In the children's area we've begun building a living willow bower over the sunken bird hide that was created last year. This area is a bird hide for youngsters from which they can observe the many small birds that feed and nest around the garden, while remaining hidden by willows and tall grasses. Three nest boxes are arranged around the area, which we hope will have residents soon.

The bird hide has a willow tunnel joining it to the rose pergola that leads down from the Still Room to the Herb Garden.

Another attraction for kids in the Herb Garden is Pete's Bed. Pete (or Peat), who has moss for skin and grass for hair, sleeps on an old iron bed at the end of the garden. His bedspread is a quilt of pansies.

It's a bit chilly down there at night, so we're going to put in a fireplace for him filled with orange and yellows flowers. Sarah also has plans for a bedroom carpet for him but she won't tell me how she's going to do it. I'll have to wait and see.

The Gunnera plant outside the front door (that many a photograph is taken of during the summer) is in flower now, its giant flower spike 30cm high and 10 across in keeping with the scale of its enormous leaves. Right now those leaves are only about 15cm across, a fraction of their full metre span, but then they were only buds a week ago so that's quite a rate of growth.

The same is true of many of the plants, both wild and cultivated, around the Perfumery. A week or two ago everything was still hiding from the cold, only the ash buds tentatively unfurling. Then a little warm spell, a little rain and suddenly Spring is upon us, the hawthorn is in bud, gentians are up and all is well with the world again. Patches of green are appearing all over the herb garden, giving me an opportunity to photograph new growth and an incentive to re-visit our Herb Guide and add a few more pages.

We're hoping that by the end of the summer we'll have descriptions of everything you can find in the Herb Garden available online. We also intend to do a printed guide in poster form for visitors. What tends to happen quite often is that people wander up to you, hand you a very tiny fragment of something green, and politely ask: "Could you tell me what this is?" The answer they get can depend a lot on our mood at the time: mostly we tell the truth, but occasionally we'll make up some entirely new "unique to the Burren" herb, like say, Leprechaun's Ears. In this we follow humbly in the wake of the famous Clare botanist, P. J. O'Kelly, who collected and sold plants to avid Victorian collectors, and who, it was rumoured, was not above adding a little extra mystique to a humble fern or orchid to enhance its market value!