VISITORS to the Blossoms from China lectures and guided walks during May at the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin may not grasp a horticultural connection with a small church at East Ferry near Midleton in Co Cork.
Gurranekennifeake is not a name to slip easily from the tongue, but then, unless you happen to be a dedicated gardener, neither is Paeonia mlokosewitschii. Consecrated in 1867 as Holy Trinity Church, this small red-brick building might be just one of many other churches of that name, but the Caucasian yellow peony first described in 1897 had no nominal rival at the time of its appearance in Ireland. And while the townland, its seven syllables smooth in the mouths of those who know it well, suggests the grove of the Kennificks, it is at Belgrove across this inlet at East Ferry on the north-eastern lip of Cork harbour that church and flower unite.
The ferry, called up by a whistle, brought the traveller across to Cobh, or Great Island; the landing stage on the opposite bank was sited between the parks and farmlands of Belgrove and East Grove. East Grove was the home of the Bagwell family – and more recently of Loretta and the late Lewis Glucksman – while the most renowned owner of Belgrove House was William Edward Gumbleton, one of the first to grow P mlokosewitschii(Molly the Witch.). His bequest to the Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin in 1911 was his library, described by Glasnevin's then director Sir Frederick Moore as the richest botanical library in Ireland.
An obituary by Moore recalled Gumbleton as a man of strong character, fearless in his criticisms and of very tenacious opinions: "It is not to be wondered at", wrote Sir Frederick, "that he was not always a favourite". What he was, though, was an authority on herbaceous perennials including Kniphofia (he grew 40 different species of this) pampas grasses and shrubs, including 24 species of Philadelphus, but these, while described in an article in 1896 as presenting "a brilliant picture of regulated floriferousness and vigour" were only the outward show of a garden examined by Keith Lamb and Patrick Bowe in A History of Gardening in Ireland(1995). Their pages reveal the quality and variety of the work at Belgrove, where water lilies were grown in raised ponds and tanks; a begonia B lemoineibloomed here for the first time in the British Isles in 1875, followed in 1881 by the first flowering in Europe of Eremurus himalaicusand in 1892 by the first blossoms of Buddleia colvilei.
They were all at it during the second half of the 19th century in Cork where a coterie of proprietors included Richard Beamish at Ashbourne House near Glanmire: his estate where he had cultivated the Himalayan poppy hybrid Meconopsis x beamishiiwas considered as one of the finest examples of alpine gardening in the British Isles. Across the Lee estuary at Blackrock William Crawford, a friend of Gumbleton and like him unmarried, had a famous garden at Lakelands, packed with Himalayan and South American trees and shrubs as well as well as a magnificent collection of orchids and rhododendrons. Although only an Araucaria, or monkey-puzzle tree, stands as a reminder of Lakelands, the Crawford name lives on in Cork where William was an inspired benefactor of the arts and sciences, and while both men are remembered as the brewing firm of Beamish and Crawford, William Crawford's horticultural fame includes the first flowering in the UK of Magnolia campbellii.
Holy Trinity church was built in 1867 on the site of the chapel of Rath, recorded since 1302 and in the diocese of Cloyne. By the late 18th century that chapel was derelict, but after some years the new church was designed for the site donated by Richard Goold Adams of Jamesbrook Hall. Fitting his building on the very edge of this narrow inlet, the architect William Atkins must nonetheless have cherished the challenge of the location, all water on one side and overhung by fine estate woodland on the other, even today and at every season remarkably lovely.
The happy exercise in red brick with limestone banding and fine stonework completed by a 75ft-high bell tower brings an appropriately romantic aura of French Gothic to the view, especially when seen from the yacht-freighted moorings at Marlogue Inn across the water.
Perhaps the most important physical, as opposed to spiritual, aspect of Holy Trinity’s interior is that its simple nave, enhanced by the Atkins’s signature of banded coloured brick, has never been altered apart from the installation of gas lamps and heaters. Under the scissor-truss roof springing from stone corbels, local names are traced in vivid narrative windows; hand-made coloured glass panels include the Gumbleton crest, while a mural tablet inscribed to William’s memory was put up by his godson John Bagwell. In the chancel the mosaic floor depicts a boat carrying Christ and his apostles, the gift of William Gumbleton who, despite his noted asperity, was a generous benefactor of several charities and whose short journey to worship in this church was made by boat.
William Gumbleton is not buried at Holy Trinity church. He lies, at his own command, at a corner of the woodland beside what was his walled garden. After his death in 1911 Belgrove was absorbed into the adjacent farmlands of Marlogue, its beds and shrubberies dissolved into pastures; its avenue vanished, its walls and greenhouses were demolished. Nothing remains now to speak of the Gumbleton legacy except for his library at Glasnevin, this half-hidden stone laid flat in a wilderness of trees and, here between wood and water, the mystic mosaic boat at Gurranekennifeake.