Ireland: It Ain’t Fair
June 30th, 2010
Some of our group lusting over the subtropicals at Ireland's Ilnacullin Gardens.
I’m just back from leading an 8-day garden-themed tour of Ireland with 32 fine, fun, fellow soil jockeys from central Pa.
The first thing I plan to do is file a protest with the World Court on behalf of all Pennsylvania gardeners.
It seems that when it comes to gardening, the Irish got all of the good stuff. We got the Japanese beetles, unbearable heat, blackflies, groundhogs and numbing winter cold.
Ireland doesn’t have any of that. It’s got moderate temperatures that hover between 40 and 70 degrees all year, plentiful rain (usually), and surprisingly few bugs and animal pests.
What surprised me most, though, was the range of species the Irish are growing. Despite an ideal garden climate (thanks to the Atlantic Gulf Stream), Ireland has only about 850 native plant species. But plant-lovers that they are, they brought in species from all over the world and found that many of them grew even better than in their homelands.
Something seemed out of kilter about palm trees in Dublin. But without a Mechanicsburg-like January to kill them off, the Irish palms think they’re on a tropical island.
It's true... palms grow in Ireland.
Our Harrigan Holidays tour group also saw flame trees from Chile, cypress from Tasmania, alpine perennials from the Himalayas, and oddball flowers from South Africa and New Zealand.
The biggest hits were gunnera and monkey puzzle trees.
Gunnera is a rhubarb-like perennial that sends up jagged-edge leaves the size of patio umbrellas. For real. They grow wild in wet areas, especially along stream banks.
The monkey puzzle tree is a tender evergreen with wide-bladed needles and straight arms that poke out randomly. It looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book.
About half of what we saw I had never seen before — mainly because we can’t grow it here.
Rather than a tour of Irish plants, it turned out to be a botanical tour of the world.
A patch of gunnera.
Ireland’s landscape also is a lot more diverse than I imagined. It’s not just rolling hills of green.
We saw a native riverside landscape and a pond filled with waterlilies in a countryside public garden called Altamont near Kilkenny.
County Wicklow’s Mt. Usher Gardens is a woodland setting with a stream cutting through it. It has one of the best tree collections I’ve ever seen.
Ilnacullin is a rocky subtropical island that supports plants from Zones 8 and 9 — Florida territory.
Other parts were mountainous like Colorado, and still others were farmland and not that different-looking from Pennsylvania.
Thyme blooming in solid rock in Ireland's Burren region.
Oddest of all was the moon-like, rocky landscape of western Ireland’s Burren region, which had creepers such as the daisy-like mountain avens, lavender-blooming thyme, a squat version of purple sage and even a few wild pink orchids growing out of a sea of solid rock.
Surprisingly, we didn’t see many potato farms. Small dairy farms are far and away the most common type of agriculture. We visited one, and I can report that Irish cow poop very much resembles American cow poop.
I didn’t see any leprechauns, and no, I didn’t kiss the Blarney stone. The line was long. We did see a rainbow, which so far as I could tell, didn’t lead to a pot of gold.
It did lead to a herbaceous perennial border filled with 8-foot-tall blue delphiniums, golden lady’s mantle and red hot pokers, which suited me just fine.
I’ll be leading another trip to see the gardens of Northern Ireland next June 18-26. Stops include the Belfast Botanic Gardens, Mt. Stewart House and Gardens, Glenveagh Castle and Gardens and Ballydaheen Gardens, plus a variety of sites and other attractions in and around Belfast, Derry, Donegal, Galway and Limerick.
It’s priced under $3,000, and that includes airfare, hotels, admissions, guides and most meals. More details are at www.harriganholidays.com or https://georgeweigel.net/georges-talks-and-trips.
Maybe that pot of gold is in the north…