IRISH GARDENING 



VOl.U.MK IV. 



A MONTHLY JOURNAL DEVOTED TO THE 



ADVANCEMENT OF HORTICULTURE AND 



ARBORICULTURE IN IRELAND 



The Making of our Home. 



By Chaklotte G. O'Brien. 



MAW are the lovely places in Ireland of 

 which the tourist knows nothing, and 

 of them the wide-spreading-, far-reach- 

 ing, blue-glancing distances of our grand 

 Lower Shannon are most worthy of loving 

 praise, or, at least, I thought so, for the fates of 

 my life made me a true lover of the Shannon 

 before I well had sense to know my right hand 

 from my left. First, 

 in mere babyhood, 

 from the heads of the 

 high towers of Dro- 

 moland Castle, Co. 

 Clare, I remember 

 the beautiful blue 

 distances, but am 

 not sure if the river 

 itself showed ; any- 

 how , the r i \- e r 

 coimtry left on my 

 mind a vision of dis- 

 tances of blue and 

 purple. Then later, 

 when we lived in Co. 

 Limerick, ten miles 

 inland, the first 

 joy of our lives was 

 a long day spent on the shores here ; therefore 

 no sooner did I, at twenty-one, begin to handle 

 my own money than a vision of a cottage at 

 Foynes, my own building and my own forming, 

 began to hover before me. If it had not been 

 that a man-of-war was permanently in Foynes 

 at the time I was able to take the work in 

 hand I fear my too wise friends would ha\ e 

 gone further than remind me that "fools build 

 houses," &c. However, my folly gained the day, 

 and proved good wisdom in the long run, and 

 after all we " fools " who take a little bit of the 

 surface of our country and make it beautiful and 



A Home in the Making (First Stage 



*' A bare little house perched on a hiil-side." 



useful, and yearly spend money maintaining 

 honest labour, seem to me to do a work of more 

 real use and charity than "slumming" after 

 the people who have been forced into the towns 

 owing to the neglect of the possibilities of 

 country life. I own it makes me feel very bad 

 when I see friend after friend taking money and 

 life and families away to London, leaving our 

 country that so needs 

 loving help bare and 

 desolate, and our 

 people unemployed 

 and uncultivated. 

 I know one little 

 mud liovel, it has 

 two feet of garden, 

 it is hardlv fit for 

 human habitation, 

 but the roses and 

 other flowers make 

 my mouth water as 

 I drive by, and I say 

 the man or woman 

 who does that on a 

 big scale or little is 

 doing that which is 

 pleasing in God's 

 sight and worthy of human honour, and God 

 bless him or her. 



Having got permission to build after much 

 to-and-fro, I had to pitch on a suitable field and 

 get it — no easy thing in Ireland at that time. 

 But I was in luck, and secured a little five-acre 

 (Irish) basin on the hillside close over the river 

 and sloping south, covered with furze and 

 bracken, otherwise quite bare. We built the 

 house, turned the plough over the lovely 

 bracken field, and put in unlovely potatoes for 

 two or three years, then meadowed it. The 

 furze still remains a standing joy and expense. 



