AT first sight, Anita Ainsworth's garden looks like an easy jumble of charming everyday plants sweet roses, twining clematis, big yellow daisies and white arum lilies; in short, the type of garden you'd expect a nice old lady to have.
Oh! How wrong you would be! And, you would deserve to be sent smartly packing for being so blindly presumptuous. For, although Lady Ainsworth is eighty six ("and a half"), she is no anodyne old timer. Razorsharp, thoroughly opinionated and alarmingly knowledgeable, she is a formidable gardener. And her "jungleoid" garden she cannot bear to make free with the secateurs - is filled with rare and interesting plants.
Not foil her the brash modern cultivars with overblown flowers and unnatural habits. Instead she grows species plants and old varieties - naturally elegant and simple, untampered with by high tech breeders.
"They were the things with which I was brought up, and I think that this is why I like them. Also," she admits cheerfully, "it's sheer snobbery - they're more difficult to get. And it's a kind of set piece thing one does - that one has old roses and old fashioned plants."
Early in the year a bed of "arum-y characters" - plants with wide cowls sheltering their peculiar flowers - comes to life. Here there is the mouse plant (Arisarurn prohoscideiim) whose spring blooms look just like a cluster of brown mousey bottoms and stringy tails - "it's absolute heaven if you have small children in the garden". Another character was "borrowed" from outside a church at Castletownshend. "But I have a feeling that the woman who assisted me in borrowing it was the church warden, so it was fairly safe."
Behind the house, a shady place is favoured by ferns, trilliums, Nottingham catchfly, Jacob's ladder and a pink flowered galium "that stinks of foxes" (and it really does).
But Lady Ainsworth's real love is roses. Mostly grown from cuttings collected in "very, very old gardens", there are dozens around her house, so she seems to live in the middle of a rose thicket. Boule De Neige forms perfect, scented snowballs, while a tree sized, dusky leaved Rosa glauca is spangled with pink stars. Creamy white Alheric Barbier clings thornily to the hand rail by the front steps and the unpronounceable tea rose, General Schablikine minds the gate. Maiden's Blush proffers fleshy pink blossoms: "It also has a very improper name," she volunteers, "Cuisse de Nymphe Emue - the particularly well coloured ones are called that."
The rambling, cerise bloomed Souvenir De La Bataille De Marengo, whose name rolls sonorously off Lady Ainsworth's tongue, has had its name changed to "something like Russelliana which is much less exciting, but I still think it's a sweet person". And a lovely single, white rose from Westmeath has long defied identification, with nobody knowing its name, even the "grand chaps" who have visited over the years.
An enormous growth of glossy, evergreen foliage covers one wall of her little house. It is sprouting miraculously from a lone pot. "That," she waves, "is the Macartney rose. It is said to be the best in Ireland," she adds carelessly. She and the Macartney rose have been together for 25 years, and she's not about to let it know how important it is, especially since it sulked blossom less for its first decade. "It just sat in a pot for 10 years and I really got fiercely bored with it. About a year later I said to it "You're a dead loss!" and I heaved some liquid manure at it. Away it went, and it's never drawn breath since." The Macartney rose is fed "when I think of it" with stable manure and compost "and possibly rose fertiliser, although I'm not liable to waste good fertiliser on it!" she says firmly, letting it know who is boss around here.