1980s REVISITED:There were water-gardens and goldfish, patios and crazy paving, and who can forget the ever-present rockeries?
IF THIS NEWSPAPER'S archives are anything to go by, there was a good deal more gardening going on in the 1980s than in the current decade. In spring of 1980 a whole wheelbarrow of experts were contributing to The Irish Times' new "Go Gardening" page.
There were authorities on vegetable-growing, shrubs and trees, bedding and roses, herbs, fruit cultivation, greenhouse-growing, town gardens and even flower-arranging. Among those dispensing advice was our present science editor, Dick Ahlstrom, who exhibited a fine versatility in horticultural matters, including those uber-1980's features: patios and crazing paving, rockeries, and bottle gardens.
Bottle gardens? Do you remember bottle gardens? During the 1970s they were the preserve of hippies and Americans, but they went mainstream in the 1980s. My erstwhile boyfriend (now husband) had a jumbo-sized one knocking around his house when I met him in the 1980s. The great balloon of glass - as big and as ungainly as a space hopper - was forever in the wrong place, and its garden-ness forever in a state of incompletion. I don't recall ever actually seeing any plants in it. I suspect that, despite the books and articles devoted to bottle gardens, there were more empty or sick bottle gardens than replete and healthy ones.
But the 1980s, especially the early years of the decade, were an era for fiddly projects ( crazy paving and rockeries). Gardens were filled with earnest individuals nipping and tucking bonsai, tending strawberry barrels, growing herbs in old cartwheels laid on the ground, sticking diamond trellis on the wall, and hanging baskets of flowers on either side of the front door. The more adventurous and dextrous people built pergolas, arches, bridges and Japanese gardens.
Ponds and water-features spread wetly throughout suburbia, as fountain kits and pre-formed and flexible liners became readily available. In many gardens the liners remained highly visible: a triumph, proud and home-made, of function over form. And with the water-gardens came the goldfish, and hot on the heels of the goldfish came the heron. It swooped at dawn on huge, grey, primeval wings to pluck the gleaming water creatures from their new homes.
The gardeners of Ireland were collectively outraged at this ruthless pond-pillaging. They took to the airwaves, venting their grievances on RTÉ radio's Ask About Gardening programme, hosted by Gerry Daly, the people's number one gardener. Daly, who still presents the show, remembers, "Yes, it was the beginning of the great battle with the heron. And," he adds, "it was the start of the vine weevil problems, too".
Vine weevil, the larvae of which munch their way through the roots of plants so that they collapse in a heap overnight, was the much-feared, new pest of the 1980s. It thrived in the peat-based compost that was becoming increasingly popular with both nurseries and gardeners at the time. Like most new pests (eg the New Zealand flatworm of the 1990s, and the horse chestnut scale of this decade), it settled down to become a familiar nuisance, rather than the expected cataclysmic disaster.
Sadly, vine weevil had no interest in the great light-excluding, neighbour-alienating hedges of Leyland's cypress that were being planted everywhere at the time. Nor was it partial to the variegated poplar (Populus x candicans 'Aurora') sweeping in a piebald rash across the countryside. Variegated plants - striped, spotted, splattered and speckled - were all the rage. They ranged widely across the aesthetic spectrum, from the coolly elegant, pale-margined hostas such as 'Frances Williams', to the nausea-inducing Houttuynia cordata 'Chameleon'. This yellow-pink-red-and-green, heart-shaped groundcover plant was prevented from taking over the gardens of Ireland solely because of its unpronounceable name.
The walls of this island, meanwhile, were being clothed with the mottled ivies 'Goldheart' and 'Paddy's Pride' (my own garden wall still has a small choleric and streaky patch of the latter, to which I'm sentimentally attached, because it reminds me of our old, long-passed dog, Paddy).
A garden designer friend who started up in the 1980s remembers: "Few people would even consider using a garden designer, especially in the country. Ninety per cent of our clients were in Dublin," even though she was based in Wexford. "And most people wanted low maintenance: shrubs and groundcover. There was still a heather-and-conifer hangover from the 1970s."
Familiar shrubs at the time included hydrangea, berberis, hypericum, Kerria japonica, hebe, mahonia, skimmia, fuchsia and forsythia. This last bursts out in yellow splendour in spring - and looks gangly and awkward the rest of the year. Edna White, writing in this paper on March 15th, 1980, informed us: "Christopher Lloyd calls it the 'yellow peril', and it has just broken out in half the gardens in Ireland." The other half had pampas grass, marooned on an island bed in the middle of a sea of lawn; lawn that was dutifully mowed every Saturday morning with the latest device in grass-cutting: the electric-powered, orange, Flymo hover mower.
Saturdays mornings, in some households, were also given over to tending the vegetable patch. "It was the tail end of growing your own," says Gerry Daly, who recollects one of the items from the television programme that he presented, Room Outside: "Our £10 plot was hugely popular. It was something like five metres by four and a half metres, and we got all the seeds and fertiliser for £10. There was great interest!"
There was little interest, however, in organic growing, although the organic movement was enjoying a boisterous infancy in Britain. A few isolated organic souls - such as Rod Alston of Eden Herbs in Co Leitrim - were dotted about Ireland. And most gardeners were completely unaware that the father of self-sufficiency and sustainable gardening, John Seymour, had moved to Co Wexford in the 1980s - where his few classes were eagerly attended by followers from all over the world.
The 1980s also saw a resurgence of cottage gardening, of the herbaceous border, of box edging and of semi-formal designs. The cutting-edge outdoor space was likely, oddly enough, to be a pastiche of the Edwardian garden. In gardening, what comes round goes round - and not just on the compost heap.
Diary Date
Saturday, November 15th: The Poetry of Plants,Lewis Glucksman Memorial Symposium at Trinity College Dublin, in association with Dublin City Libraries and Bord Bia. Speakers include Dr Matthew Jebb of the National Botanic Gardens; Anna Pavord, garden writer; Andrew Wilson, garden designer; and Dr Shelley Saguaro, academic and author of Garden Plots: The Politics and Poetics of Gardens.Admission is free, but booking is essential (tel: 01-8963174; www.tcd.ie/longroomhub/events/forthcoming)