Cork's competitive streak is most beautifully realised in two wondrous gardens, which both compensate for the extra rain, writes Jane Powers
EVERY TIME I TRAVEL to Cork, I encounter the worst vices that can prey upon a gardener: the green-eyed monster of jealousy, and its evil twin, covetousness. Let me clarify: these base emotions do not gnaw upon the the good gardeners of Cork (who are entirely blemish-free, except, perhaps, for the most occasional and teeniest smidgen of competitiveness). No, these depravities invade me, and take up residence in my heart until I am safely back over the county line.
The envy starts even before I set foot in a garden. At this time of the year it is triggered by the montbretia growing out of the roadside ditches and banks. This orange-flowered, strappy leaved plant, which has escaped from cultivation to colonise the country, is a weedy looking thing on the east coast, where I live. But in Cork (and Kerry too), it is a great, beefy, tropical-looking plant, with foliage and flowers at least half as big again as those in Leinster. Teamed with fuchsia, its frequent companion on these Munster byways, it makes a scene of unmatchable exoticness. Also vastly superior in Cork are the roadside ferns, being plumper and larger, and so, more sculptural, as they poke out from the lush ditches.
Of course, I don't want to live in Cork (sour grapes, as you know, is the antidote to jealousy and covetousness), because of all that rain - even if it is the rain, and the extra degree or two of mildness, that inflates the vegetation so magnificently. Cork city averages about 1,050mm annually, while the airport, which is on higher ground, experiences 1,200mm. Head to west Cork, and the average rainfall can be 1,800mm or more, and in some select mountainous regions it hovers around 2,800mm (for those of you who - like me - are not very metrically nimble, let me just remind you that that's more than nine feet of water). Where I live, the average rainfall is about 700mm, a quarter of that last figure - although there's been nothing average about this year so far.
But back to Cork. As it happens, one of my favourite gardens in that county (and in Ireland) is in one of the driest parts. Jean and Peter Perry's Glebe Gardens in Baltimore is in a notch on one of west Cork's several peninsulas, and is missed by the heaviest of the rains. The soil, light and acid, has been built up over the past couple of decades with compost, seaweed and straw, and is now abundantly productive. Given pride of place behind the 19th-century rectory is the organic potager, where the many raised beds are in constant use, feeding the Perry family, and providing fresh food for the excellent Glebe Cafe.
Jean Perry's genius and planning skills are such that kilos of vegetables and salads are produced daily, yet the garden manages to remain ornamental, and even romantic. Sweet peas and nasturtiums clamber and march across the more utilitarian crops, and cover them in a veil of bee-laden flower. Nearby, a cutting garden is filled with plants that bounce and sway in the sea breeze: cleome, cosmos, Verbena bonariensis, and other cottagey blooms. The view, across the waters of Church Strand Bay, may be admired from here, from carefully placed seats. A meadow, a woodland walk and a turf amphitheatre are some of the other delights in this five-acre, atmospheric slice of Cork. If I could pack up this garden and somehow roll it out in the sixth of an acre around my own house, I would.
Cork gardeners, are, as I hinted a little earlier, among the most competitive in the country. One gardener well-known for his competitive (and winning) streak is Brian Cross of Lakemount garden. In times past, his Glanmire plot was several times the overall winner of an important national gardens contest. In recent years, though, he has wound it down a little, to allow himself and wife Rose to spend more time at their second home, elsewhere in the southwest.
Nonetheless, the 2½ acres of good acid soil (this was a poultry farm before it was a garden) are filled with interesting plants in the pink of health. All the "Cork specials" are here, plants that do well in this mild and moist climate. Among them are several Australian tree ferns and South African restios (Cape reeds). Also from that part of the world, and doing enviably well, are countless crocosmia and watsonia. Many of these came from the great Cork gardener Nancy Minchin, who died in 2000. Brian cites her as one of his two inspirations, and Dublin plantswoman and garden-maker Helen Dillon as his other.
The plants that I covet most, however, are the hydrangeas, great rivers of them, flowing through the garden, and stitching its disparate parts together. Because of the acid soil, many of the flowerheads are blue, a clear cerulean blue that makes one weak at the knees. The rest are mauve, lavender, or a gentle, sophisticated pink. There is none of that overwrought, choleric pink that inflicts hydrangeas on alkaline soils (including my own). I imagine that on a clear day, the blue of the hydrangeas is echoed by the blue waters of Lough Mahon in the distance.
For the most part, though, this is an inward-looking garden, composed of a series of arresting tableaux and vignettes. Among the images that have stayed with me are a trio of posh trees (Heptocodium miconioides, Prunus serrula and Luma apiculata 'Glanleam Gold') with their lower trunks stripped of branches to display their muscular, athletic legs; several, sympathetically displayed vases by ceramic artist Tim Goodman; and a pretty plant house - which started life as a potting shed and blossomed into a wonderfully self-important conservatory.
And a final, seductive memory is that of Rose Cross's own patch (entered through a gate tongue-in-cheekedly entitled "Rosemount"). Sensible vegetables once grew here in neat rows, but have now been supplanted by an irreverent and glamorous rumpus of mad-coloured flowers: shocking crimson and wildly orange dahlias, jelly-coloured daylilies, hot pink phlox, deep purple salvia, and a rake of other impudent plants. When I think of this bit of the garden, the memory is suffused with green: the colour - I have to admit - of envy.
OPENING HOURS
Glebe Gardens, Baltimore, Co Cork, is open 10am-6pm, Friday-Sunday in September, and by appointment at other times. Admission: €5. Tel: 028-20232; www.glebegardens.com
Lakemount, Barnavara Hill, Glanmire, Co Cork, is open by appointment. Admission: €7. Tel: 086-8110241; www.lakemountgarden.com