While there’s still plenty of eye-catching early autumn colour on display at Glenarm Castle & Garden, energies are gradually becoming focused on the downtime in the months ahead.
Even award-winners, like this expansive Co Antrim coastal garden, home to the annual Tulip Festival, need a rest.
Originally dating from the early 1800s, the four-acre walled garden that last year secured the Historic Houses Garden of the Year Award has been restored over recent decades by current residents the Earl and Countess of Antrim, Randal and Aurora McDonnell.
Garden designer Catherine Fitzgerald has created a series of ornamental garden ‘rooms’ echoing the original productive purpose of the Walled Garden in Victorian times, while planting advisers include Belfast City Council’s former head gardener Reg Maxwell, and plantsman-cum-garden consultant Neil Porteous.
Among the highlights are vibrant herbaceous borders; rose and shrub borders, a decorative vegetable garden interspersed with cutting flowers.
There’s also a pear garden, medlar garden, apple orchard and cherry garden as well as a mount commanding views over the whole garden, and the sea and glen beyond.
According to Aurora, current talking points for visitors are the collection of hydrangeas, the Acer Griseum and Acer palmatum ‘Osakazuki’ in the arboretum, and the colourful collection of dahlias.
“We have planted the garden to ensure that we have a very long summer season,” she says.
“It builds up to an incredible crescendo of colour at the end of the summer where we have a hot border full of fiery reds and oranges, wild flowers and lots of late flowering summer trees so the garden carries on looking pretty spectacular well in to October, when we close at the end of the month, to focus on those all-important winter jobs.”
There’s a full-time team of gardeners working year-round to ensure Glenarm Castle & Garden looks its best in the months it’s open. Their chores in the weeks ahead include cutting back hedges in places where they’ve become too thick, and cutting back the mixed perennial and rose borders.
“I think people forget how much work goes on when things are more dormant,” says Aurora.
“There’s lots of plant propagation going on in the glasshouse, over 10,000 tulips to be planted, and hedges to be cut, as well as borders to refurbish and mulch.”
Once the hot border goes over in the coming weeks, all the plants will be removed temporarily as it undergoes a refurbishment.
“The soil will be replaced and mulched – old plants split and new plants, which we have been nurturing in our glasshouse, will be added to this,” says Aurora.
“The Woodland Walk above the garden, which we hope will become a woodland garden in due course, is also very much a work in progress and we will be developing that over the winter as well.”
The garden’s dormant period barely lasts three months, as its location close to the moderating influence of the sea means the first signs of spring come comparatively early and there’s rarely any frosts.
“It doesn’t stay asleep for very long,” says Aurora.
“Around Christmas, early January some of the first flowers emerge on the lovely Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’ appear. It’s is a beautiful shrub with very scented pale pink flowers. That’s always an exciting moment.
“Of course, this is swiftly followed by some of the early tulips and narcissi.”
