Restorer of famous wild gardens at Mount Usher

Madeleine Jay, who has died aged 94, had a life which was at times as colourful and wild as the world-famous garden at Mount Usher in Ashford, Co Wicklow which she bought in 1979 and saved for posterity.

Born in Zurich into an American-Swiss family, her musician father Ernst Röntgen was a cousin of the inventor of the X-Ray and her mother, Marion McHarg, the daughter of an immensely wealthy Scots-Irish railroad magnate, Henry McHarg, who frowned on her marriage to a mere musician.

The marriage was troubled and her parents separated when she was 12, her father returning to the United States. Madeleine, a lover of horses and a keen show jumper, was packed off in her mid-teens by her fervently Germanophile mother to a famous cavalry school in Hannover, where the instructor was Heinz Brandt, coach of and participant in the German show team which won six golds at the infamous Berlin Olympics of 1936.

‘Absolute fascist’

Madeleine had a disastrous relationship with her mother, a domineering figure described by her grandson Konrad as “an absolute fascist” .

Madeleine spent the war years working for the Red Cross, where her view of Germany was altered by her experience of distributing food parcels to combatants of all sides and dealing with refugees. Her fluency in English, French and German was an asset.

In the immediate aftermath of the war she met, and wasbriefly married to an Hungarian aristocrat, Imre Rohonzcy, but then decamped to Ireland, where she had an extraordinary encounter which was to change her life.

At Hannover, the commandant of the riding school had been Hans Jay, a German cavalry officer who had also sought refuge in this country in the company of an old friend, a Swiss cavalry officer named Eric Mirville, at that time running a stables here.

Here Jay was reunited with his old pupil, Madeleine, who had been 16 when he had first met her in Hannover. In 1952 the couple married, the 27-year age difference proving no barrier to a true love match.

Jay had been one of the group of senior German officers in Paris in 1944 who had disobeyed an instruction from Berlin to destroy the French capital. Slightly later he was implicated in the July plot to assassinate Hitler initiated by Claus von Stauffenberg.

The Jays settled down in a Victorian house near the Curragh, eking out a living training horses before returning for a few years to Germany, where Hans Jay ran the Hamburg racecourse.

However, in 1958, receiving an inheritance on the death of her mother, Madeleine and her husband returned to Ireland and bought a farm near Kilcock, Co Kildare, specialising in breeding horses.

Mount Usher

After her husband’s death in 1972, Madeleine Jay looked around for another property and eventually bought Mount Usher from the Walpole family in 1979.

There, over the next 30 years, working closely with her young head gardener, John Anderson, she rebuilt the 22 acres of wild garden which have entranced visitors since, surviving many viscissitudes, including the devastation wrought by Hurricane Charlie in 1987.

Afte this cataclysm, Anderson said, it had taken Jay and a small crew of gardeners two years to repair the damage.

He recalls his old employer as “a genuine eccentric, who kept herself to herself”. He remembers a party – a rare event – which having started at 12 noon, ended, teutonically, at precisely 2pm with the guests dispersed.

Donald Pratt of the Avoca Handweavers’ company, which has leased the gardens since 2007, says that had it not been for Madeleine Jay “you never know if the gardens would have survived . . . she was a fantastic woman” .

Madeleine Jay is survived by her son, Konrad, her daughter-in-law Katherine (née Anderton) and her grandsons, Alexander, Nicholas and Oliver. She was predeceased by her sister Tini, and a half-sister, Frederica, by her mother’s first marriage.