Twenty-five years ago, Mary Healy came to live in a tall house with an elongated, narrow back garden. It was "one, long corridor of bindweed with nothing else but an apple tree, a straight path and a cold tap".
For years she did the best she could with this tricky space. But she couldn't afford to change the one thing which really irked her: that graceless, straight path plodding obstinately down to the end of the garden, and stretching it into a long, thin infinity. Unexpected help was at hand, though, in the form of a dreadful error at the laundrette: "They washed my curtains instead of dry-cleaning them. They were destroyed." When the compensation arrived, instead of rushing down to the fabric shop to examine swatches of best chintz or moire, Mary got a job done on the path.
Now it flexes fluidly alongside a wide, curved border and a velveteen-smooth lawn - in its turn flanked by another broad, flowing border. The garden is still narrow - nothing short of invading the neighbours will change that - but it is not a long, thin streel of a thing. No, it is an exciting place, stuffed with really well-grown and well-chosen plants, and where an entire patio garden is hidden away behind a screen of tall verbascums, echiums, sunflowers and that one-time lonesome apple tree.
Mary Healy is mad about plants: "I was told by a professional garden person that I should stay out of a garden centre for a whole year," she says, shocked at the idea. "He thought I needed a breather." And it is true, Mary grows a lot of different plants in her garden, a sure recipe for a jangly and disparate look. But not so here, where each plant is painstakingly placed so that it either blends in with or bounces off its companions.
Annuals, so often shunned by "serious" gardeners, are used to good effect: a tripod of sweet pea rises out of a pinkish part of the border creating a strong focal point; unusual sunflowers are clustered here and there, not just the big yellow dinner plates, but small ones, orangey-brown ones and many-headed ones; deep pink and purple tobacco plants hug the front of the border (has anyone else, wonders Mary, noticed that tobacco plants don't smell half as sweet as they used to?).
Bold and beautiful combinations pull your eyes up short, feeding them richly before they move on to the next arresting spectacle. A common fern of regal proportions forms a richly-textured picture with a coral bark maple, a purple-leaved Japanese maple and the tall, stripey grass, Miscanthus sinensis "Zebrinus". A deep-red Cercis canadensis "Forest Pansy" its leaves the colour of well-hung steak, vibrates off the serrated pale-green leaved Melianthus major. "I love a big statement," admits Mary, "and the smaller the place the bigger the plants."
And, at the end of the lawn she has put this dictum into practice: 10-foot-tall, woolly verbascums raise their flag-pole flower spikes up to the sky, their last primrose-yellow blossoms breaking out of knobbly grey fur. Huge echiums are hung with nearly-spent flower heads, thick pillars of feathery cosmos foliage hold pink tissue-paper blooms.
A winding path through these skyscrapers leads you into a magical sunken patio. Liscannor slabs are surrounded by sculptural hostas, euphorbias and ferns. A peculiar plinth known as "Peter's Tomb", after the man who helped build it (he is very much alive) adds height to this area and is clothed with a spiky ivy, `Needlepoint'. Lady's mantle has seeded itself in between the flags, along with a crowd of other species. It is a peaceful place, a place where you might rest your limbs and empty your mind after a hard day at work.
But not Mary Healy: "I work at it endlessly." No, there's no sitting and staring for her, "I come home in the evening and I work until it is pitch black at night."
Cybergarden news: South East Growers, a bunch of nine nurseries in Waterford, Kilkenny and Wexford, has recently launched a Web site. The rather prosaically titled "Irish Gardening Industry" site is not just for those in the business, but for you and me too, providing really good links to hundreds of international horticultural Web sites. It's guaranteed to keep you away from your own, real, flesh-and-blood garden for hours on end, as you explore virtual botanic gardens the world over, or look up a list of poisonous plants in Mrs Grieve's A Modern Herbal (an invaluable reference book published in 1931), or learn to build French drains, or check out the exact taxonomy of that peculiar white ceanothus. . .
Go see for yourself at: http://www.se-growers.ie