IRISH GARDENING 



VOLUME IV. 

 No. 38 



A MONTHLY JOURNAL DEVOTED TO THE 



ADVANCEMENT OF HORTICULTURE AND 



ARBORICULTURE IN IRELAND 



The Making of our Home. 



[Fourth 



Ry CH.MiLOTTF 



WE liave in our early days many of us 

 heart! of the trag-ic fate of the fisher- 

 man (and his wife) who first asked 

 for a little rise from starvation, and who, after 

 many asking-s when Emperor, went again to 

 salute the Djin of the Sea 



" My wife Ilsabil will have her own will, 

 And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee ! " 



demanding to be Pope, and thereon returning 

 to their primitive starvation. Now, I have to 

 he my own " Wife Ilsabil," and actually find 

 myself very much inclined to follow suit to her. 

 I have the glorious river with its rushing 

 waters from all west Ireland ; I have the sweep- 

 ing tides boiling up from the Atlantic at spring- 

 tide, or mirroring the clouds and the stars when 

 the passion of their movement is for a moment 

 allayed ; I have golden furze shining like the 

 helmet of Goliath on the hill-tops ; I have the 

 delicate ferns and mosses of Erin, the prim- 

 roses and wood anemones and heather besung 

 of poets, the hazel catkins and the golden 

 goslings, the larch tufts, and the veils of tender 

 green beech leaves. What have 1 not ? Ha ! 

 ha I There is always a "Wife Ilsabil" in the 

 corner of the mind who is quite ready to do a 

 bit oi grumbling before she is asked, and she 

 says, you have no wall ! " And just think 

 what you could do if you had a fine kitchen 

 garden wall ; yes, and just turn your mind to all 

 the innumerable miles of unused walls, demesne 

 walls, garden walls, labourers' cottage walls, 

 walls old and new, derelict or shining with wet 

 plaster all over this whole country of Ireland, 

 and going to waste, and you trying to grow 

 roses and clematis, figs and peaches, apples 

 and plums, myrtles and what not on the few 

 yards the house affords as wall shelter, Oh, it 



-) r/ic/c. ) 



G. O'Brien. 



is pitiful ! " Poor me -and I feel very sorry for 

 myself when she talks that way, and represents 

 that not only I have no wall but that I should 

 destroy the picturesque beauty of the place if I 

 attempted to build one. Here I lie down on 

 tlie sofa, take up Robinson's Flower Garden or 

 Irish G.\rdening, and straightway begin to 

 pl.int and scheme. Trinity College Gardens or 

 Glasnevin do not count, and Kew is not in it 

 when you come to look at my visionary walls. 

 A noble sijrht they are ; you may walk by them 

 and gather dozens of the bloomiest peaches, 

 and no wasps will sting you. But too long 

 I have left the ;ictual, and now let us return to 

 our muttons. 



I approach roses with a sense of awe. equal 

 not to their beauty but to my own ignorance. 

 It is not to say that I am no expert in roses, 

 but that I am grossly, palpably, unbelievably 

 ignorant. I do not know the difference between 

 a " Tea" and an H.T. or an H. P. or any other 

 mysterious letters. I should be shamed before 

 the veriest non-gardener at any exhibition if 1 

 were asked to sort or name the kinds even in the 

 rough. I can neither graft, nor bud, nor prune, 

 nevertheless I am getting into roses ; but I must 

 begin from the beginning and explain how it 

 happens I am so ignorant. Well, when I laid 

 down the east garden (my first) I said I would 

 have roses ; but chips of rock were not suitable, 

 so I made a big bed three feet deep, well manured, 

 &c., and planted. But, no ! except the regular 

 sweet old stagers that bloom for a month in 

 June, the roses refused to grow. I tried them 

 here, I tried them there always the same 

 story — the bought-grafted roses failed. I gave 

 it up ; all the more because I had on the house 

 one so glorious that I hardly needed more — 

 a climbing Devoniensis. This rose, up the front 



