Put a garden in an area of outstanding natural beauty and it becomes exceptional; add two dedicated gardeners and some of Ireland's most valuable and interesting plants in the garden and it's heritage in the making. At Lakeview House in Co Cavan, Daphne Levinge Shackleton and Jonathan Shackleton are creating such a garden, almost from scratch.
Jonathan's father, David Shackleton, was an eminent plantsman, amassing one of Ireland's most important plant collections - the rare, the beautiful and the peculiarly Irish - at his home, Beech Park in Clonsilla , Dublin.
In his later years, until the house was sold in 1995, the garden at Beech Park was looked after by Jonathan and Daphne: moving from Beech Park was a wrench but Lakeview, a farm set in Cavan's gentle landscape of softly swelling hills, glittering blue water and textured woods, was waiting to receive them and their trailer-loads of plants. The land here has been in Daphne's family since 1660 when a single-storey thatched dwelling was built on it. This has grown upwards and outwards through the centuries to become a rambling farmhouse, its many slate roofs pitching at every angle. To one side of the house a south-facing slope was terraced in the 1930s, and a good garden planted. But by the time the Shackletons arrived little remained but some near-derelict apple trees, a couple of maples and lots of leathery bergenias, a popular plant of the period. The rest was overgrown with briars, laced with chicken wire and full by old stumps. A JCB and a once-off programme of weed-spraying cleared the ground.
And then a terrifying, blank canvas presented itself. How to make sense of this stony terrain? How to make a garden to clothe the tilted surface of this acre? And how to make it blend with and bounce off the surrounding landscape: Mullagh Lake, sparkling through the trees; Mullagh Hill, its lofty cross flying a triumphant Cavan flag after last month's Ulster final; the Lough Crew Hills, rising in the distance; the slanting fields that graze a small herd of organically-raised cattle. (And, on a darker note, how to cope with the fact that, nearby, planning permission is being sought for an intensive piggery with more than 5,000 animals. "It's been our biggest heartbreak," says Jonathan.)
Rebuilding the dry-stone terraces seemed an obvious thing and Joe Lynch, who had been at Lakeview for 35 years, produced for the Shackletons a perfectly-constructed walls and steps of grey Silurian rock ascending from the house. In time, Daphne will plant them up with pinks, violets, rockroses and alpines. The rest of this part of the garden was the subject of endless discussion, and the position of the central path, which will be lined by herbaceous borders, was hotly debated. Eventually, a decision was made, "and when we started investigating, we found the old path on pretty well the same position," Daphne says. This path and others, and an ornamental vegetable garden, are now lined with the irregular stones the ground is so rich in, and the tracery of paths looks as if it just rose out of the stony soil rather than having been placed there by human hand. The bulk of the plants are camped out in a field behind the house: thousands upon thousands of them. The entire legacy of Beech Park is here, including some of the most coveted plants in Ireland, planted in strict lines with no regard for pedigree, colour or personality, organised solely by genera: all the crocosmias in one row, all the daylilies in another, the phloxes (many of them unnamed, old varieties rescued from walled gardens by David Shackleton) in another.
Until September, when they will be planted in the new borders, they make an incredible and moving sight: the sun lighting up their uncountable colours and the breeze swaying their thousand plumes and spires.
The gardens at Lakeview House, Mullagh, via Kells, Co Cavan, will be open to groups next spring. Telephone: 046-42480. Email: jshackindigo.ie