GARDENS:June Blake is a good plantsperson as well as boasting great design flair - a seriously rare combination of skills, writes Jane Powers
THERE ARE A FEW gardens in Ireland of which I never get tired, and to which I like to return again and again. They're the gardens that have layers and layers of interest, in different seasons, at different times of the day, and in all kinds of weather.
One such is June Blake's garden, on the Dublin side of Blessington. It adjoins her pretty, Victorian, farm-steward's cottage, and is nicely set off by meadowy pasture, some fine, mature trees, and the big house looking down benignly from the hill above.
When I visited it first, 4½ years ago, the garden was dominated by the operations of her nursery, with a plant sales area taking centre stage. Yet, enfolding this functional space were beautifully planted borders: the sunny ones filled with airy perennials and grasses, while those in shade were home to a crowd of interesting woodlanders, including choice hellebores, arisaemas and trilliums.
Since then, the garden has changed from year to year: the display area was banished offstage, and new beds appeared where the thousands of black pots had previously stood. A quiet seating area nearby, with neatly clipped box hedging, was completely erased, and a shallow, reflective pool, its interior painted black (the better to mirror the outside world), was constructed.
It takes guts to sweep away a perfectly good box hedge and a well-positioned bench, especially when there is nothing wrong with them, and an awful lot that is right. But the long, glassy rectangle that has taken their place is so much more right, with its watery surface reproducing the scudding summer clouds and doubling the punch of a clump of fiery Crocosmia 'Lucifer' leaning from an overhanging bank.
Such bravery and assurance are uncommon in a plant lover; it is usually designers who possess the determination to keep changing a space until its structure is exactly right (and then, alas, the plants so often come second). A good plantsperson with serious design flair is a real rarity - and I can think of only a tiny handful in this country.
Knowing that June Blake is a woman of unusual creativity and boundless energy, I shouldn't have been surprised by what I found when I visited her garden a few weeks ago. But I was gobsmacked. It was as if an entirely new but fully formed garden had sprung up from the stony Wicklow soil in the months since I had last called by.
Last year's reflective sheet of water was still there, as were the beds near to it (now full of hot-coloured dahlias, languid banana plants, an irreverent gathering of white shasta daisies and other well-chosen shrubs and perennials). But the rest of the area around the house was unrecognisable.
Where once there was a car park, there is now garden, and incredibly (as it was planted only in the past few months), it is filled with masses of healthy foliage and plentiful blooms. The secret to such abundant growth is trailer-loads of good manure, sandwiched in between layers of new topsoil: "Pure acid, mountain soil," says June. "It's black, beautiful, gritty soil, but with very few nutrients - so we gave it plenty of manure." The wet summer, meanwhile, has obliged with most of the watering.
June's taste is eclectic: sherbet-coloured single dahlias (seedlings of D. merckii and D. sherfii crosses), tropical-looking leaves (banana, gunnera, Paulownia, Polygonatum), bright- flowered sages (including the crimson Salvia microphylla, and the up-to-two-metre-tall Brazilian S. confertiflora, which bears fuzzy, scarlet spires), and curiosities such as the Mexican Amicia zygomeris (a pea relative with floppy leaves and wine-stained bracts), and the elegantly proportioned varnish tree, Rhus verniciflua.
It's impossible to list a representative selection of the plants here, because there are many hundreds (and probably thousands) of annuals, perennials, grasses, ferns, shrubs and trees. In less assured hands, this would be a recipe for a chaotic visual disaster: avid and indiscriminate collecting is aesthetic death to many gardens. But, in her three-acre patch, June has combined all these disparate sizes, shapes, forms and colours of plants into an endlessly exciting concoction. She is one of the most artistic gardeners I know.
She is careful to credit those who have helped her achieve this enchanting space. "It was," she claims, "gardening by committee. So many people were coming and going, and getting into discussions". Among them were gardening friends Glenda Barry, Grainne Devaney and Brian Kelly, and sculptor Michael Calnan. And she can't praise Ned Maguire enough, a man who is a wizard with stone, and who is so accomplished with a mini-digger that he can nudge a boulder the requisite few centimetres into the exact and perfect spot.
Stone is important in this garden: dry stone walls surround all the new beds (at just the right height for sitting, and for Poppy the dachshund to sun herself) and monumental boulders form the backdrop to an exquisite and poignant contemplative garden.
This shady and calm spot, which June has dedicated to the memory of the Clare poet- philosopher John O'Donohue, is carpeted with grasses and furnished with mature tree ferns.
Her favourite "cool" plants (which are both sophisticated and require a chilled root-run) love it here: plants such as Paris, Podophyllum and Deinanthe bifida. A "river" of quartz rocks, which June has collected since she was a child, flows through the serene space, their jagged white edges looking like tumbling foam.
"I'd read John O'Donohue's work for years, and I thought it would be lovely to have somewhere to remember him. I associate him with stone, because of the Burren - but of course, I had to have native stone here."
Indeed, none of the stone here is from further away than a mile, and most of it has come from the Blake farm fields, or was salvaged from the estate. All the other materials were also found on site: the enormously long spruce trunks that enclose another bed were redundant shelter-belt trees; and the cast-iron girders delineating yet another bed once held up the hay shed roof. You can't get materials more local than that.
It is this intense indigenousness, combined with June Blake's perfect eye, that makes this garden one of the most comfortable in its skin that I've ever seen.
• June Blake's Garden, Tinode, Blessington, Co Wicklow (on the N81, about 500m after the Tramway Antiques shop). Open: March 1st to October 28th, Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-5.30pm, Other times by appointment. Admission: €5. Call 087-2770399 or see www.juneblake.ie. June Blake will be one of 35 plant-exhibitors at the Farmleigh Plant Fair tomorrow, 10am-5.15pm at Farmleigh, Castleknock, Dublin 15; www.farmleigh.ie
DIARY DATE
Wednesday, September 3rd at 8pm, at Dungarvan Town Hall, Dungarvan, Co Waterford: Dungarvan Flower & Garden Club presents Caspar Gabb (Chelsea Flower Show gold medallist and Chelsea Flower Show judge), who will speak on Natural Elements in your Garden. Admission: €15; www.naturalelementsdesign.co.uk