A garden is an ephemeral thing, left to its own devices. Just a season or two of neglect and Mother Nature is quick to reclaim her territory, lassoing the land with snaking whips of bramble and tying it up with bindweed, carpeting it with coarse weeds and peppering it with tough little treelets.
All over Ireland there are beautiful gardens hidden under moist decades - even centuries - of uncurbed growth and decay. Now, thanks to an EU-funded scheme, The Great Gardens of Ireland Restoration Programme, about two dozen of these sleeping gardens (some are near comatose) will have been resuscitated by the end of 1999. The scheme was launched in 1994, and the first applicants to be approved were Sir John and Lady Nugent of Ballinlough Castle in Co Westmeath.
"It's not that we were any better than any of the other gardens who applied," says Pepe Nugent. No, it was because her husband, John, had somehow managed to crack the secret of filling out the frightening form - after four months' hard slog. "Nobody else could fill it in, and they were all on the telephone asking for help. We became `Lord Forms'."
Whatever about John Nugent's form-filling prowess, the many acres of walled gardens, meadow, woods and water that surround the grey, turreted bulk of Ballinlough Castle, his family's home for five centuries, are quite gorgeous, and their restoration is a timely thing. The gardens and demesne will not be open to the public until May of next year, when all the structural work will be finished and the immature plantings will have had time to put on some flesh. But the bones (such good ones) are there now, and I - along with several hundred other people - saw them recently when the Nugents opened their gates for a special preview.
This is the second time within living memory that the gardens and demesne have been wrested back into order. When John Nugent's father moved to Ballinlough in 1938, everything was in a near-derelict state. "The place had been kept alive for 10 years by a marvellous, old steward who lived in the house on his own with no heating, no water and rats everywhere."
The steward, Owen Quinn, helped locate the paths buried under layers of neglect: "He used to say to my father: `If you dig there, there may be a path.' " And so, the network of walkways was gradually uncovered: the veins and arteries of the estate were unclogged. Next chore was to dredge the lake - the smaller of two on the property - which had been dug at the time of the Famine. It took 16 men, two horses with scoops and four with carts the best part of a year to clear it out. (This time round, two big diggers did the job in just 10 days.) Trees were planted by the lake and in the walled garden.
When the present Nugents moved to Ballinlough in 1990, things had again begun to slip into a state of dishevelment. Lady Nugent "was terrified of the garden, I didn't know a dandelion from a daisy". She did know, however, that the stately blue cedar on the drive was a Cedrus atlantica `Glauca'. "My father-in-law pointed it out the first time I was here. I always remembered the name because I thought it sounded like a gargle."
Now, well-versed in the ways of dandelions and daisies, Lady Nugent is learning fast about garden plants, and is perfectly at ease chatting about epimediums and alchemilla - both of which feature in the walled garden. This, divided into four compartments, is the centrepiece of Ballinlough. In the first section a still pool and a tennis court are separated by a froth of a double herbaceous border, next is a rose garden with a wonderful cupcake-cum-pergola in the middle ("we call it The Thing. Actually, I'd better not tell you what we really call it"). A cottage-type garden follows and then a domestic, working garden with vegetables, an orchard and "acres of rhubarb, because we thought it was quite attractive looking".
Around these highly-cultivated, ordered areas are calm lakes, little canals and swooping meadows with great spools of golden hay lying about. And thanks to the Great Gardens Programme - and the goodwill of the Nugents - from next year it's there for everyone to enjoy. As Lady Nugent says: "The thing about a place like this: you can either sit here miserably in a stiff mackintosh all by yourself - or you can share it with other people."
Garden clippings
The European Boxwood and Topiary Society is looking for Irish members. The society aims to bring together anybody with an interest in the art of growing, snipping and clipping box, yew and other scuptable species. Membership costs £15 sterling details from Geoffrey Willis, Greenmount, Glenamuck Road, Kilternan, Co Dublin.