How old is your garden? A few years? A decade or two? Or maybe parts of it date from more than a century ago? If that is so, you know all about maintaining vintage and tumbling walls, operating on elderly trees, and treating oh-so-carefully the venerable fabric woven by some forgotten garden-maker.
Yes, but imagine owning a garden so ancient and with such a complicated history that even distinguished garden historians are puzzled by it. And restoration is crucial, because time is wrapping it in its inevitable cloak of chaos, muffling its origins and character.
Such a garden - magnificently placed in a Victorian landscape park of rounded hills topped with copses of trees - belongs to Charles and Emily Naper at Loughcrew, Co Meath, an area bearing the imprint of thousands of years of human habitation. The nearby Loughcrew Hills, cored with megalithic passage graves, look down on the estate, where antique structures rise from the land. A flat-topped Norman mound or "motte" and the 15th century church of St Oliver Plunkett with its attached tower house are just some of the remnants of an earlier age here.
Epochs of gardening have left their marks on the place. Some are of thrilling audaciousness, like a spooky Victorian grotto and a 17th century yew walk - its furrowed trunks grasping the ground with arthritic-fingered, gnarled roots. Others - like a mysterious colony of hellebores at the base of the motte - are uncertain freckles on the earth's surface. Everywhere there are clues to an extensively and intensively landscaped and gardened site. Interpreting the clues, many of them confused and obscured by layers of history, is an awesome task.
But, though the clues may be clouded, Charles Naper is not. "My hope for the gardens is very clear," he says emphatically, "We wish to salvage, conserve and restore what has been left here by generations of gardeners and farmers." And this is being done, thank goodness, with help from the splendid Great Gardens of Ireland Restoration Programme and with a hard-working FAS team supervised by head gardener Donal Galvin.
Already the Victorian grotto and its adjacent fernery have been cleared to reveal a perfect stonework shelter - missing only a seat and a simple roof - embellished with strange, porridge-textured "lake stone". Moss-covered rocks crowd sinisterly around it, amongst them "dragons' teeth" pointing sharply skywards in a menacing fashion. Not far away, a doughnut-shaped mill pond has been released from the indignity of being used as a dump for 60 years. Now it is filled with clear, fresh water flowing fairytale-like from beneath the outspread roots of a deodar cedar. Further water channels, lined and capped with limestone are being restored. Emily Naper (whom I have privately renamed "Energy" Naper) has been rebuilding part of a channel herself, woman-handling hundredweights of unwieldy rock in a damp, cramped, space. Nearby, the walled garden - where a poet-farmer now lives - has a lovely, long south-facing exterior wall. In Victorian times it provided a warm backdrop for a flamboyant herbaceous border. Soon this confection of delphiniums, daisies and phloxes will be reinstated, with period-correct planting, researched by Belinda Jupp and designed by Daphne Shackleton.
The Naper family built their first house at Loughcrew around 1653. Where exactly it stood is one of the many riddles that must be unravelled. Stretches of cobbling hint at one location, parchmarks on a grassy plateau proffer another - and the experts suggest at least two others.
Matters are not helped by the fact that many of the Naper records were lost, either in the Four Courts, or in a series of tragic fires that eventually (in 1964) destroyed the last Loughcrew House - a monumental structure designed by the neoclassical architect Charles Robert Cockerell. The remains of the house lie picturesquely scattered about, just like a Piranesi etching of Roman ruins. The resemblance is not lost on the Napers, who - with admirable theatricality - plan to re-erect the portico and massive columns as a "ruined Greek Revival temple" (Now that's what I call style.)
But in the meantime, the puzzling traces of Loughcrew's past history must be dealt with. "We need information about the estate and family to help sort out the jigsaw," says Charles, who welcomes hearing from people with pictures, maps or writings pertaining to this magical piece of Meath.
Loughcrew will open officially sometime before the millennium. In the interim, careful visitors (in stout shoes) are welcome to inspect the progress of the restoration.
Diary dates: Garden open at Kinvara, Killiney Hill Road, Killiney, Co Dublin: Harry and Odette Wilka's sloping garden overlooking Killiney Bay is filled with tender and unusual plants. Today and tomorrow: 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. and 2.30 p.m. - 5 p.m. Admission £2.50 in aid of RNLI.
Rose Festival at St Anne's Park, Raheny: today 9 a.m. - 6 p.m., and tomorrow 1 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Eilis and David Walsh's garden, Woodleigh, Ballinlough Road, Cork, open tomorrow: 12 noon - 6 p.m. Proceeds in aid of COPE Foundation.