WHEREVER you are in this part of Ireland, you’re never more than a few streets or fields away from a superb secret garden. We all know how glorious public gardens like Mount Stewart and Belfast’s Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park are but the allure of our best private gardens is, by their nature, less well publicised.
But now a new BBC One Northern Ireland series has enlisted the services of two of Ireland’s biggest gardening personalities to find out which of the region’s private gardens ranks head and shoulders above the rest.
Greatest Gardens, which begins on Monday, sees enfant terrible Diarmuid Gavin and south Dublin gardening queen Helen Dillon come together for a tour of the north’s best gardens. These horticultural havens, tucked out of sight from the public, will often have obsessive, proud owners keen to cultivate the biggest, the brightest and the best.
In what has been likened to the acclaimed annual Ulster Gardens Scheme adapted for TV, the pair will visit private spaces across the north over three episodes. They examine and appraise the gardens while the nervous owners wait inside for their verdict. And there’ll be plenty of good-natured banter and takeaway tips from our experts along the way, before they finally meet the gardener.
At the end of the programme, after seeing all three gardens, Diarmuid and Helen decide which of the three they have enjoyed the most, basing their choice on the classic gardening competition criteria of planting, design and good gardening practice.
This pair of gardening grandees will no doubt demand the same exacting standards they set themselves. Gavin is a former Chelsea Flower Show winner and one of these islands’ most respected garden designers and broadcasters. Dillon – often referred to as a national treasure – is a distinguished gardening lecturer and writer. Her own Ranelagh garden, with its famous granite canal, is renowned for being one of the best in Ireland.
In programme one of the Waddell Media-produced show Diarmuid and Helen are in counties Down and Antrim. They cast their expert eyes over a stunning compartmentalised paradise behind a Georgian terrace house in Hillsborough, a reclaimed quarry in Carrowdore and an ambitious river landscape in the shadow of a stunning modern house in rural Antrim.
In the second programme, the two are let loose in Co Derry and north Antrim. They enjoy a Jane Austen-style Georgian garden in Derry, a bijou Islamic-style sanctuary in Portstewart and great lakeside splashes of colour near Glenwherry.
The third and final programme sees Diarmuid and Helen encounter an astonishing mixed bag of great private gardens in Co Down. A massive estate on the banks of Strangford Lough, with a 200-year-old walled garden provides the starting point, followed by an eccentric garden dominated by Alpine rock plants behind a modest house in Bessbrook. Finally they visit Castlewellan, where they encounter a large, mature garden peppered with lots of comic touches.
Speaking earlier this week, Scottish-born Dillon said the overall standard was very good as she believes “gardening is very much in people’s backgrounds” in the north – more so than in the Republic.
And what qualities were the deciding factors in choosing a winner? “It’s something that’s very hard to put your finger on,” she said of the as-yet unnamed garden.
“It’s not about what flowers are out or whether it’s large or if it’s small – it’s about whether it has that unknown quality that makes it a magic space.”
:: Diarmuid Gavin and Helen Dillon present Greatest Gardens, beginning on BBC One Northern Ireland, Monday 1 June at 7.30pm.
