Patrick Forde: PATRICK FORDE, who has died at the age of 67, was the 12th generation of the Fordes to live at Seaforde in Co Down.
The family already had estates in Wexford when they bought the lands here, which included the Lord of the Manor of Teconnaught, in 1607 for £8,000.
Politically they were Whigs, particularly Mathew Forde whose liberal views in 1798 made him open to suspicion in Dublin Castle.
Patrick, too, was a man who did more than his share of public duty in the difficult days of Northern Irish politics. He was one of the first people to join the Alliance Party and was a councillor on the Down District Council between 1977 and 1985.
Twice he stood in the Westminster elections; in 1979 when the seat was won by Enoch Powell and in 1983, when the SDLP candidate Eddie McGrady took it. When electioneering, Patrick played Viennese waltzes over the loudspeaker on his car rather than political propaganda which was perhaps the reason why, in the 1982 Assembly election in South Down, he came within a few hundred votes of taking the seat from the DUP. He was a member of the old Police Authority, a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lord Lieutenant for County Down.
Patrick Forde will be remembered also as a horticulturist. In what had been the overgrown walled garden at Seaforde, he and his wife created a garden that is now open to the public.
The design is part romantic with a mass of lilies, magnolias and cherries, and part formal with a Mogul tower that looks down on the hornbeam maze, a rose bower and a summer house built of recycled central heating pipes.
Seaforde holds the national collection of eucryphias with 21 varieties planted in two walks that in the late summer are billows of blossom crowned with golden stamens. He also ran the most innovative commercial garden in Ireland where plants are grown from seeds, many of which he had collected himself on plant-hunting expeditions to China, Africa and South America. He made eight botanic expeditions to the Himalayas - Thomas Pakenham describes getting lost with him in a snow storm when they attempted to cross the Doshong La, a pass between Tibet and India, without a guide or maps.
His other successful venture was a butterfly house where gorgeously-coloured, exotic butterflies spend their short lives flitting like flying handkerchiefs or tiny brilliant jewels through the tropical jungle plants.
One consequence is that the Fordes receive numerous telephone calls from members of the public asking what to do with a butterfly they have found in a window with a damaged wing or even a broken leg.
Patrick Forde was educated at Eton and inherited Seaforde on his father's death in 1961. He had spent a year at agricultural school and had also worked on farms in Scotland and Denmark when he took on the estate. He married Lady Anthea Lowry-Corry, daughter of the 7th Earl of Belmore, who survives him with their daughter Emily and sons, Mathew, Charles and Finnian.
Patrick Forde: born December 12th, 1940; died March 1st, 2008