Go west

The gardening press in England is often criticised for being parochial. The Scots I meet never miss an opportunity to remind me of this but you could argue that Irish gardens and gardeners are more at the margins of our consciousness. Geographical distance is a major factor, of course, but against that must be set a common pre-20th-century gardening heritage — among the moneyed classes, at least — as well as a common language, temperate maritime climate and, in the case of Northern Ireland, citizenship.

Indeed, if it were not for the impact made by an irrepressible trio of contemporary horticulturists, I suspect that Irish gardening would be largely ignored by English gardeners. These three are Helen Dillon, whose garden in Dublin has been made famous and enviable by her many lively books and articles, Diarmuid Gavin, who plies his garden-design trade in England but retains strong links with Ireland, and the late and much-lamented Ulster landscaper, garden broadcaster and writer, John Cushnie.

General ignorance was the reason why I found it so salutary to read E. Charles Nelson’s recently published book, An Irishman’s Cuttings — Tales of Irish Gardens and Gardeners, Plants and Plant Hunters (Collins Press, £26.99). Composed of articles that originally appeared in the Irish Garden magazine, this absorbing, if slightly donnish, book describes a variety of colourful Irish gardeners, who have been prominent at some time in the past 250 years. Many of the names were shamefully unfamiliar to me, but not the plants that they have introduced into cultivation: Galanthus ‘Straffan’, Viola ‘Molly Sanderson’, Hypericum ‘Rowallane Hybrid’, Sisyrinchium ‘Aunt May’, and Escallonia ‘Slieve Donard’, for example. Some of these gardeners, once encountered, are not easy to forget, if only because they have names straight out of Somerville and Ross; I particularly took to the Earl of Clanbrassil of Tollymore, after whom a slow-growing form of the Christmas tree, Picea abies ‘Clanbrassiliana’, is named.