Old walled gardens are odd places. The high brick-and-stone packaging, built to shelter plants and to exclude unwelcome animal life, has the added effect of magically concentrating and intensifying the secluded atmosphere. At Beech Park in Clonsilla, Co Dublin, the 200-year-old, 15-foot walls enfold a potent place where bees buzz more loudly, dragonflies flit more radiantly and flowers smell more heady. When the outside world impinges - a plane roaring overhead, a mobile phone cheeping unbidden in a pocket - it is an incongruous intrusion.
In Beech Park's acre-and-a-half inner sanctum - attached to the home of Neil and Mary McDermott and their young family - the atmosphere is more rarefied than in most walled gardens. Made famous by the zealous plantsman, David Shackleton, it was at one time filled with a collection of plants that left most experts outrightly impressed: not an easy feat in the often poker-faced horticultural world. When the McDermotts bought Beech Park, the gardens, although well-loved by the previous guardians, were in need of renovation. "The modern way of doing things would have been to put the bulldozer in," says Neil McDermott roguishly. "Make a nice tennis court, grow vegetables in another corner, and have another corner where the kids could play. Grand job! And no work!" Nothing could be further from the reality. In fact, the McDermotts are carrying out a careful restoration at Beech Park: "I had a responsibility to look after it," says Neil. "I didn't plant it, but it was there for 100 years." The first thing to be done, when the family arrived in the spring of 1996, was to deal with the perennial weeds that had woven themselves through all the borders. "We got this young man, and he went around the garden on his own from morning till night, weeding," remembers Neil. "He weeded the whole garden twice." (Shortly afterwards, the young man went off to study for the priesthood, proving - or perhaps debunking, depending on which way you look at it - the oft-engraved verse "One is nearer God's heart in a garden /Than anywhere else on earth".)
Then last year Seamus O'Brien, who had been head gardener at Glanleam in Co Kerry, came to Beech Park to take over the reins. Weeding - with ground elder and bindweed proving the most tenacious culprits - has continued apace, as has a massive clearance of a vanished walk behind the walled garden, leading to an octagonal summer house, now derelict. By this autumn, the borders should be totally weed-free and replanting of gaps will begin in earnest. The alpine beds - in David Shackleton's time filled with choice plants - are to be rebuilt and restocked. Some of the candidates are being grown on by Seamus from the 554 varieties of seed he collected in Tibet and Nepal last year, including edelweiss, primula, anemone, meconopsis, corydalis, gentian and lily. (And just for the hell of it he sowed an additional 500 or so kinds of seed this spring - making most of our propagation efforts seem pretty paltry.)
In the meantime, new collections of plants are being quietly accumulated: of hellebores (many cultivars and all the available species including this year's most sought-after fashion-plant, Helleborus thibetanus) and of dieramas - at least 20 varieties. The graceful dieramas, or angel's fishing rods, with their papery bells hanging from thin threads, are a favourite of Neil McDermott's. Another favourite is the scented rambling rose, "Phyllis Bide" that decks the west-facing wall with peachflushed flowers from June to September. "I like value in a plant, I suppose," he says, and then wisecracks: "There's a rose out at the front of the house called `Prosperity', I like it as well." But if prosperity of a different kind is to be found at Beech Park, it probably won't be in the eight acres of garden - "a nonentity as far as money-making is concerned" - nor in the attached biodynamic farm - "a challenge". Instead, Neil McDermott has plans for the future: "to build a large garden centre and a visitors' centre and restaurant . . . Somewhere that will uplift the north of the city," he explains. "I would just like to see it being a magnificent place where people's spirits would be raised. There is so much depression knocking around now.
"I'd like people to be uplifted in a simple way. How simple can you get?" he says, examining an upturned sisyrinchium flower, it's perfect parts neatly arranged in threes. The purple-dipped, yellow sisyrinchium is a new arrival in this historic enclosure. Not far away, one of the older inhabitants, an agave or century plant (socalled because it takes an age to flower) has decided to hoist its lone flowering spike this summer. Its dark-green and purple 12-foot branching stalk has grown through the glasshouse roof and is silhouetted against the sky. Hoverflies poise themselves motionlessly above the rusty-orange and green buds. I must admit, it is uplifting - simply.
Beech Park, Clonsilla opens today and tomorrow from noon to 5 p.m. (and will not be open again until next year). Plant sale in courtyard. Admission to walled garden, £2.