On May 1, 1891, Geraldine Mayo, of County Kildare in Ireland, armed herself with a stout pair of loppers and climbed a ladder\u2014long skirts and all.\u00a0 \u201cI got on the top of the Yew hedge in the garden at the risk of my life..,\u201d she wrote later, adding that the risky yet satisfying hedge pruning operation was \u201cthe first clipping it has had.\u201d<\/p>\n
Geraldine, more formally known as Lady Mayo, was born Geraldine Ponsonby and became the wife of Dermot Bourke, 7th<\/sup> Earl of Mayo, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat.\u00a0 The yew hedge was part of the garden at Palmerstown, the Bourke family home, to which Geraldine came as a bride in 1885.\u00a0 Her garden diary is the nexus of Lady Mayo\u2019s Garden<\/i> by Kildare Bourke Borrows.<\/p>\n The best garden history books are portraits in words and pictures that bridge gaps in time, place and social station to link readers to historic landscapes.\u00a0 Those portraits are especially compelling in Lady Mayo\u2019s Garden.<\/i> \u00a0Subtitled the \u201cThe Diary of a Lost Nineteenth Century Garden,\u201d the book captures a snapshot in time\u2014the life of an Irish estate garden from 1885 through 1923.<\/p>\n Intrepid though she was, Geraldine possessed little gardening knowledge at first.\u00a0 She did, however, have a plenty of energy, intellectual curiosity and an uncommon talent for drawing and watercolor painting.\u00a0 Beginning in 1891, she kept a diary, illustrated by her own plant portraits.\u00a0 The book was further enriched by watercolors made by her father, Gerald Ponsonby, an English politician and bureaucrat and amateur artist.\u00a0 The beautifully reproduced watercolors make the diary truly singular.<\/p>\n As a 22 year-old newlywed, Geraldine dug in, literally and figuratively, dirtying her hands with some of the \u201creal\u201d garden work, visiting nearby botanical destinations and making the acquaintance of horticultural experts and other aristocratic gardeners.\u00a0 Many of them gave her gifts of advice, bulbs and plants.\u00a0 After a rough start with a rotating cast of head gardeners, some of whom may not have appreciated her hands-on approach; Geraldine found a talented garden stalwart in Simon Doyle. By 1899, fourteen years after starting in the garden, Geraldine was exhibiting her daffodils at a Dublin flower show.<\/p>\n Daffodil references abound because the diary was mostly about the spring garden.\u00a0 Tight finances forced the Mayos to rent out the large house during the summer and early fall to help make ends meet, so Geraldine rarely saw or commented \u00a0on the garden during those times.\u00a0 Over the 37 years documented in the diary, Geraldine and her gardeners planted tens of thousands of bulbs, which was, as she pointed out, \u201cvery hard work.\u201d\u00a0 To keep costs down, she would often lift and divide daffodils and plant bulb offsets from her tulips.\u00a0 Her watercolors of various daffodils, tulips, crown imperials and scillas are exquisite, making me wish that I had more of all of them in my own garden.<\/p>\n With the renewed interest in heritage gardening and heirloom varieties, many of Lady Mayo\u2019s favorite spring plants are obtainable today.\u00a0 The lovely Narcissus poeticus recurvus and \u2018Conspicuous\u2019 daffodils currently sleeping in my garden are the same varieties that graced the Palmerstown house grounds 100 years ago.\u00a0 The same is true of the \u2018Duc van Tol\u2019 and \u2018Clara Butt\u2019 tulips.<\/p>\n The garden at Palmerstown would probably not be ranked among the greatest of its time, but there is no question that it was a beautiful, inspired place, with plantings that were personal in a way that would not have been possible with a less hands-on gardener.\u00a0 Geraldine and her husband were attracted to the aesthetics and philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement, with its celebration of all things natural and artisanal, but Geraldine also maintained a degree of formality in the garden, with lots of clipped hedges, topiaries and other stylized elements.\u00a0 I especially liked the \u201cM Garden,\u201d a parterre with a sundial at the center and the family\u2019s initial outlined in rosemary, surrounded by scrolling, interlocking plantings of cotoneaster, ivy, boxwood and periwinkle.<\/p>\n Lady Mayo\u2019s Garden <\/i>is a beautiful book.\u00a0 The author, Kildare Bourke-Borrows, is a veteran gardener and writer who is also a cousin of Lady Mayo.\u00a0 His elegant explanations and commentary help fill in background information and complement the diary entries, watercolors and period photographs.\u00a0 Reading the book took me back to Palmerstown at its apex and made me want to see it for myself.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the garden survives only between the covers of Lady Mayo\u2019s Garden<\/i>.\u00a0 It was abandoned in 1922, after the house was burned to the ground by opponents of the treaty that created the Irish Free State.\u00a0 The Mayos, who had about 20 minutes to evacuate the property, saved very few things.\u00a0 Fortunately, the diary was among them.\u00a0 Even without the fire, changes wrought by world wars and economics might well have taken their toll.\u00a0 The author points out that in 1919, Ireland was home to over 2,000 \u201cbig houses\u201d like Palmerstown, many of them with significant gardens.\u00a0 Now, almost all are either gone or radically changed.<\/p>\n When Lady Mayo began her diary, she wrote the following, \u201cNow, in January 1891, the beginning of the New Year, I make the effort, with the sincere hope that in years to come it may be of interest to others.\u201d\u00a0 With the help of Kildare Bourke-Borrows, she has succeeded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On May 1, 1891, Geraldine Mayo, of County Kildare in Ireland, armed herself with a stout pair of loppers and climbed a ladder\u2014long skirts and all.\u00a0 \u201cI got on the top of the Yew hedge in the garden at the risk of my life..,\u201d she wrote later, adding that the risky yet satisfying hedge pruning … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[1067,643,515,238,234,1065,1069,1064,1066,1068],"class_list":["post-1239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-garden-book-reviews","tag-garden-books","tag-garden-diaries","tag-garden-history","tag-historic-gardens","tag-irish-gardens","tag-kildare-bourke-borrows","tag-lady-mayos-garden","tag-lost-gardens","tag-palmerstown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1240,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions\/1240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}