About a year ago I visited Butterstream in Co Meath, the garden of Jim Reynolds. We stood looking at a field adjoining the garden, bare except for a double line of young lime trees stitching a neat division down the middle. "And that's where my canals are going to be," he said, with a mischievous gleam in his eye. And as he moved away to speak to someone else, I thought: "Sure, pull the other one." Last week I went back to Butterstream, and headed straight for that field. The limes had been shifted to new positions and between them floated two parallel, silvery canals, each one 145 majestic metres of lapping, slapping water. Breathtakingly stark and simple, the canals are the "latest bit of insanity" that Jim Reynolds has created on the several acres of the family farm that he began to annex in the early 1970s. When Jim made his first foray here with "six roses in particularly challenging colours", the nearest house was the pub on the edge of Trim. Now urbanisation has leaked up to the gateposts of Butterstream in a steady flow of new homes from the town, and a housing estate abuts one corner of the garden. Such late-20th-century encroachments make the character of the garden all the more acute. Walk in through the gate and your senses are delightfully ambushed; and your brain is overwhelmed by the elegant vision, the uncheckable ambition and the impossible energy of the man who made all this. There it sits, in what was once a cow pasture, an astonishingly beautiful garden. And an astonishingly clever garden, where only a little is revealed at a time, and well-placed nuggets of temptation lure you further and further until you reach the grand finale - those canals.
The six roses that started Jim Reynolds off were a garish lot, but they had opened his eyes to the world of roses. "In an old garden down the road I noticed they had lovely old Albas, Gallicas and a few moss roses." Before long, the jaunty hybrid teas and floribundas bit the dust, to be replaced by the subtle, sexy scents and tints of old roses. By this time of the year all have spent their blossom, except for a few shy, repeat-bloomers like the dainty, shell-pink `Pompom Blanc Parfait'. But the rose garden looks good year-round with its fat box hedges making neat, green-walled compartments. In the adjacent white garden more box encloses pure-white phlox, silvery cardoons and huge pots of Paris daisies. A cylindrical tower, the colour and texture of ripe buttermilk, offers a view of the pleasing geometry of the box tracery, and of the washes of flower colour that move through the garden. Beyond the whites and silvers, the horseshoe-shaped herbaceous borders are a sea of pinks, mauves and purples. Spikes of pink lythrum, which loves the heavy, limey, clay soil, surge through the border, while mauve goat's rue and tall, blue Lobelia syphilitica fight for space. Another lobelia, `Pink Elephant' is an Irish hybrid, raised by Cicely Hall of Primrose Hill in Lucan. On the other side of the horseshoe, carefully screened from the tower, bright yellow Inula, Silphium, Helianthus and Heliopsis, all outsize members of the daisy family, make noisy yahoos of colour. The ruler and calipers reign in the little garden behind the herbaceous border. Here, a stately yew obelisk is surrounded by closelyclipped box pyramids. Nearby a still, rectangular pool garnished with topiarised box spirals and hornbeam cubes, and overlooked by a miniature temple is "a little bit of archaeology - to remind you of a garden in Rome or Pompeii".
A big, square, cool lawn backed by a high, purple beech hedge allows you time to collect your senses. Beyond are the twin canals - and more. Another pair of matching dramas is here also, but it would spoil the fun to reveal all here.