The story of Irish Gardening

Swan Park house

Farming has been the predominant form of working with the land in Irish culture. With the present economic climate, growing our own food will probably be again a bigger part of our lives. Gardening as we know it, with our neat beds, borders and lawns is a relatively new venture into land use. Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to take you back to the beginning of the phenomenon that is gardening to see how it all started and how certain periods in history changed the way we see and use the land.

In the beginning

Gardening was thought to have originated in Jericho, Palestine in 8000 BC and was introduced to Cyprus, Egypt and China in 5000BC. By 2500BC the Indus valley and South America had picked up on the idea and introduced basic gardening as they were more settled that in their nomadic pasts. The ancient Greeks designed open urban spaces, planned paths, parapets, steps, walls and ornamental buildings for simply looking at and enjoying. None have survived but our imaginations can wander when we look at Olympia and Hadrians Villa in Tripoli. Herb uses and references date back to 3000BC in Chinese documents and ancient Egyptian papyrus from the middle of the second millennium BC. Both cultures stated that herbs were used for flavouring and medicine. Herbs were probably the first cultivated edible and medicinal plants grown by the masses. The Anglo Saxons were responsible for naming many of our native herbal plants and in 812 AD Charlemagne (742-814), a holy Roman Emperor, recognised the herbs importance during his military campaigns and ordered 74 different types of herbs to be grown in the Imperial gardens.

Leaving their mark

Around Ireland and the UK there is no direct evidence of deliberate ornamental planting to pre Roman times. The Iron Age was predominantly engaged in farming. From 43 AD the Romans did bring over many horticultural ideas and plants. Vineyards were established in the warmer southern counties and plenty of plants that we now class as weeds appeared such as Lily (Madonna). Cabbages and leeks were introduced by the Romans in much the same way that the Persians introduced roses when they invaded other countries. They were a sign of their presence and influence on the conquered country. By 1066 Western Europe crusaders brought new ideas, monasteries were established with large walled gardens, orchards and herb gardens, all cutting edge stuff at the time. The large walls helped to shelter the plants, but in later years when walled gardens were built for private individuals they were mainly built to keep out the peasants who might take an opportunity to steal a bunch of purple carrots.

First cook book

The late middle ages brought us our first plant and cookbook. In 1393 a French book called ‘Le Menagier de Paris’ had recipes and instructions on how to grow hyssop, fennel, savoury, marjoram and other kitchen herbs. Medieval tapestries show gardens and orchards outside town walls and with the decline of castles, the country house stately gardens emerged as settings for building the relationship of inside and outside of the house, which is a very popular garden design idea, especially in town houses where the garden merges with the living space.

Formal and intricate

In the 16th century the Renaissance design for gardens was formal and intricate. The style had classical detail and features such as temples and statues. Native flowers, especially herbs were cultivated as well as evergreen hedging which provided a formal setting around the beds. Topiary, the shaping of shrubs, was popular too as were grass topped seats for the passerby to stop and sit for a while taking in the scents of the herbs. The ‘Knot’ garden was made popular in Elizabethan times which probably originated from Italy via Holland. These designs again generally contained herbs. There intricate patterned squares that made up the ‘Knot’ usually had box or rosemary to make the pattern and then had coloured gravel or flowering plants inlaid. These designs were superseded by ‘Parterres’ around 1644 which also incorporated swirling patterns and didn’t need any flowers as they were dramatic enough without. During the late 17th century plants were introduced, the first bedding plants if you like, to represent embroidery patterns in the garden. Some designs also used turf.

The grand manner of post Renaissance garden design was developed by Andre le Notre (1613-1700) at Versailles which again extended the concept of a palace leading into the countryside, bringing the two features together as one unit. In 1644 (a few years after the horse chestnut tree was introduced into Ireland from the Balkans) George London and Henry Wise spread the French styles of Le Notre around the UK then a succession of popular designers such as John Vanbrugh, Switzer spread the delights of urban gardens to a wider audience of mainly landed families. William Kent (1685-1748) was working on Holkam Hall in Norfolk and under him was Lancelot Brown (1716-1783) Lancelot acquired the hick name of ‘Capability’ for his habit of tactfully telling people that their gardens were ‘capable of great improvement’ . He developed a style of grass, water and trees at many of the great homes, one of the first in Ireland was that of Delaney at Deville and this in turn influenced followers such as Henry King to design Florence court in Enniskillen.
Next week: New plants and herbaceous borders taking us onto the next stage of gardening for the masses.
Photo: The walled gardens at Buncrana house were probably used more for cattle than flowers

New plants

New plant genera was being introduced from all over the world by botanists and by 1790 the Royal Dublin Society acquired the site for the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin Humphrey Repton (1752-1818) was able to use a greater range of plants that previous designers and introduced features like fountains, terraces and balustrades. The gardens were still for the elite though and this didn’t change until John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) a great writer of his day brought gardening to the rising middle classes and it marked the start of specialised designs such as rock and bog gardens. He was lucky enough to be alive when the first of many public parks opened in Derby in the UK.

Hot house

In the early 18th and 19th century most Irish country houses were set in newly planted areas with beech trees arranged around perimeter belts and fields were sprinkled with elms, oaks and chestnut trees. There were hundreds of these square formal houses spring up all around the country. As history panned out, most of these now lie in ruins and the Anglo Irish that built them are long gone. These areas were originally called ‘Elysiums’ or ‘Places of complete happiness’ Not gardens as we are familiar with, even then it was still the walled gardens that housed the flower beds and borders.

By the mid 19th century, great formal gardens in the French Baroque tradition had revived borders, carpet beds, paths and clipped hedges that surrounded the houses. William Robinson (1839-1935) was an undergraduate in the estate of a clerical baronet in County Leix (Laois) who, after a row with the owner opener up all of the hot houses on a cold December morning before fleeing to Dublin to work . Helped by Dr Moore of the Glasnevin Botanical Gardens Robinson went to the Botanic Gardens in Regents Park. He rose to be a very influential gardener, especially with wild flowers and in the late 19th century wrote ‘The Wild Garden’ (1870) and the ‘English Flower Garden (1883). These books contributed to the end of formal gardening as we knew it. His naturalism was and still is ideally suited to the Irish climate. The herbaceous borders were created.

Herbaceous borders

Then along came Dr Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) who further developed the herbaceous borders, shrub borders, wild gardens and woodland gardens. She condemned bedding plants, topiary and conservatories. In 1891 she joined with Edwin Lytyens and went on to design over 300 gardens which included the War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge in Dublin and the gardens at Heywood, County Laois. William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll laid the foundations for modern garden design in the Victorian era with their natural vernacular styles affording ideas to the wealthy and also to the masses. The garden as we know it had evolved.

Bauhaus

In 1919, Walter Gropius, a member of the modern German Bauhaus Movement incorporated the total design of inside and outside of the house and understood the connections between the two. The movement was closed down by the growing power of the Hitler movement but the influence moved to a more free thinking America and flourished. A new style emerged again rejecting the old formal designs. Thomas Church, Garrett Eckbo and Laurence Halpin broke new ground. Gardens reflected the house, landscape and personality of the owner. This movement was slow to venture over the Atlantic but it was helped along by the book ‘Gardens in the Modern Landscape’ written by a Canadian called William Tunnard and illustrated by artist Gordon Cullen.

Present day

After 1945, modern garden designers assimilated ideas from all over the world as suburban towns were developed after the war. Sylvia Crowe, Jeffrey Jellicoe, Brenda Colvern, Peto, James Russell and Brookes moved forward the art of gardening. They specialised in small gardens that had to be functional, provide some outdoor living space, an area for clothes to dry, children to play and even a place for the dustbin to go. The idea was that the familiarity of the garden should increase to give a feeling of unity and contentment for the family. This idea is still very prevalent today with the addition of the vegetable garden.

The four main designs that are widely used today are:

The cottage garden.
These make the maximum use of a small space and rely on flowering plants, small lawns and some vegetables.
The Italian garden.
Probably of classical origin, relies on architectural features, pools, sculptures, hedges, gazebos and secluded areas for contemplation.
The post Renaissance garden:
This is where the property is in harmony with the countryside.
The Irish/English romantic garden.
These are informal, picturesque, and intimate and give the opportunity for exploiting the beauty of many plant species in clumps or single specimens.

Of course most gardens of note can incorporate all of these features and often do. The use of gardens by new garden designers is now seeing these outdoor spaces becoming far more practical and productive. Vegetables can be incorporated in beds and borders just as effectively as a veggie patch and gardens can also be a place not only to relax but to house energy saving geothermal heat pumps, underground water storage, wind turbines and solar panels. Gardening designs and ideas have and always, and will always hopefully move with the times and need to be embraced and recognised as a great benefit to the quality of everyday life.

Multitasking

Need to switch off? Try gardening.

I have realised exactly why I love gardening so much. It’s the one thing in my day that I do without thinking about the next job in hand. It’s the one important time of the day when I am not multitasking—trying to pay attention to numerous things simultaneously. I do anticipate my next jobs of course, but whilst I am mowing the lawn, that’s all I can do without being distracted and putting myself in danger. When that’s finished I can go on to do other things like sweeping the driveway systematically and safely going onto the next thing.
I could blame the computer for my lack of attention to one task. I can’t stay on a webpage for more than 5 seconds before getting impatient and if the page takes a while to load I will try to fit in reading e-mails and jumping onto the pages of DoneDeal to see what classic cars are for sale before clicking to see if the original page has loaded. Glancing at pages isn’t a problem until it is an instruction to do something. I waste hours trying to do things before eventually going back and reading the information properly. As my lad say when he sees my trying to set something up and getting impatient, “RTFM” (Read the f-ing manual) it makes sense I suppose –but it takes so long.

Feel good

Multitasking jobs like phoning whilst cooking or checking e-mails/facebook as the spuds go onto the boil, we claim to do so in the name of efficiency. Scientists now think the real attraction to multitasking has a lot to do with dopamine, a feel-good neurochemical released when we're stimulated by new things, even as simple as anticipating what is in the e-mail message. One scientist tells us that “We're all novelty junkies and multitasking, especially the electric kind, is a great way to get a fix.”

NCT

I tried to multitask last week putting my car though the NCT. I thought I could use the time spent sitting in the waiting room constructively by ‘thinking’ of solutions to my daily issues. A total waste of time as it turned out. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, partly because it was so cold, but mainly because the NCT man had to jump start the car in the checking bay. Not a good start to the test. It made me far too anxious to think about anything ‘constructive’, so I just got more stressed because I couldn’t think about the things that were stressing me. I sometimes think these small windows of spare time (like the ten minute wait for the lads to be picked up from school) are useful. But realistically I’d be better off just having a nap and in much the same way that gardening does, gives my brain a rest.

Just remember

There are times when multitasking can be valuable, especially if you are flying something. But recent evidence suggests that multitasking with unrelated activities—such as trying to write an article in my head as I am watching Coronation Street, or tying to wash the sink down when I’m brushing my teeth can impair short-term memory and interfere with mental processing. I am often seen as forgetful. I now see that it’s not that I forget things; I never really remembered it in the first place.
The medical boffins with impressive attention spans say that this is partially because most of what we call multitasking doesn't actually involve doing multiple things simultaneously; it involves rapidly switching between activities, a process that saps time and energy by requiring us to constantly refocus our attention. One doctor tells us that “When a conscious decision has to be made, our brains can generally do only one thing at a time," I can relate to that. Quick and creative thinking can be impeded and when we learn something while multitasking, we use an area of the brain called the striatum, which is activated when we learn new habits or skills, as opposed to the hippocampus, which is associated with forming conscious memories and is active when we're focused. The problem with habit-based learning is that it tends to be inflexible. This generally means that if everything goes the way it’s expect it to, all well and good, but if the routine is broken by something as simple as a phone call, getting back into the swing of things can be a bit awkward.

Have you ever really eaten an orange?

Here’s a test to see if you are trying too hard to multitask. When you eat an orange, do you put the next segment in your mouth before eating the next one? Next time you eat one, just take a look. A wise sage once told me that until you eat the separate segments individually you have never really eaten an orange. You are too busy anticipating the next piece, which is similar to multitasking.
Gardening is my one great release from trying to juggle my days ‘things to do’ It makes me realise that in the day the challenge is not to find stimulation but to say no to it, to take control of my rather short attention span and cultivate a different kind of richness in my life—one that comes from leaning on a spade and looking at the scenery. It sounds daft, but by doing this I tend to get a lot more done in the day.