A Landlord's Garden in County Wicklow





A STONE'S throw from an old house where I spent several summers in
County Wicklow, there was a garden that had been left to itself for
fifteen or twenty years. Just inside the gate, as one entered, two
paths led up through a couple of strawberry beds, half choked with
leaves, where a few white and narrow strawberries were still hidden
away. Further on was nearly half an acre of tall raspberry canes and
thistles five feet high, growing together in a dense mass, where one
could still pick raspberries enough to last a household for the
season. Then, in a waste of hemlock, there were some half-dozen
apple trees covered with lichen and moss, and against the northern
walls a few dying plum trees hanging from their nails. Beyond them
there was a dead pear tree, and just inside the gate, as one came
back to it, a large fuchsia filled with empty nests. A few lines of
box here and there showed where the flower-beds had been laid out,
and when anyone who had the knowledge looked carefully among them
many remnants could be found of beautiful and rare plants.

All round this garden there was a wall seven or eight feet high, in
which one could see three or four tracks with well-worn holes--like