Natural harmony
Dublin-based garden designer Dominick Murphy and his partner David Butler have used native plants and local materials to blend their nine-acre garden in Co. Wicklow beautifully with the surrounding landscape
L ooking up, or even down, at Dominick Murphy's restored farm cottage on a remote hillside in west Wicklow it’s hard to detect any garden at all, which is exactly how Dominick and his partner David Butler want it to be. The gravel entrance drive sweeps down the hill past an expanse of meadow grass, intersected with wide, mown paths – an indication that this is, in fact, a gardened space, but one that subtly blends into the wider landscape of fields, hedges, stone walls, woods and rounded hills. Metal farm gates lead through a shrubby walkway that opens on to a stone terrace, one of the first spaces Dominick, a Dublin-based garden designer and horticulturist, created after clearing a thicket of spruce below the house.
From the start the couple were determined to retain the character of the nine-acre plot, with its dry-stone walls and farm buildings, and to respect its history as a place where people have lived since the Bronze Age. They also wanted a garden that would ultimately be easy to look after, and would be sustainable. The garden has evolved over the past eight years but the overall design – a series of interconnecting areas that have a similar naturalistic feel – was sketched out at the beginning by Dominick. Materials were to be re-used as much as possible. Re-routing the drive created surplus soil, which they used to furnish the tall retaining bank for a reflective pond on the western boundary where timber from felled spruce was used to make a cantilevered platform. Farm buildings that were still sound were retained, including the corrugated iron roofed barn that’s a dominant feature in the walled garden, which sits directly below the house.
The two large meadows to the west of the drive are framed and separated by new hawthorn hedges. “I put in these hedges to ground everything,” explains Dominick. “I don’t want to be competing with the landscape.”
This desire to blend in with the surroundings has driven the choice of plants throughout the garden. The meadows have no
introduced seed – they are strictly a mix of native grasses and wild flowers – and the other areas are a combination of wild species and plants that sit comfortably in shape, colour and form with the natural flora, what Dominick calls “plants that are one step up from nature”.
In the wild garden that slopes down from the gravel courtyard to the pond, shrubby plants grow directly out of the grass – they need to be robust enough to survive these demanding growing conditions – and include natives such as Angelica sylvestris, flag iris, gorse and dog rose and some of Dominick’s ‘one step ups’ such as the hazel cultivar Corylus maxima ‘Purpurea’. To the north of the house is Shoe Wood, a grove of mossy-limbed elders where geraniums, epimediums, Vinca minor and Hedera helix at ground level, mix with a middle layer of ferns, Libertia formosa, Kirengeshoma palmata and Hypericum androsaemum and acers creating light canopies between the elders.
The influence of the late American designer James van Sweden, who was a friend of Dominick’s, can be seen in the most gardened part of the plot, a walled garden with a large central bed filled with swathes of grasses and perennials, including the native moor grass Molinia caerulea, and Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’. “I chose the grasses for the movement they bring to the garden,” says Dominick. “The deck we made that overlooks the walled garden and across to the peak of Lugnaquilla is my favourite part of the garden.”
He has allowed the occasional exotic – bamboos enclose a boundary path, creating a passage from dark to light; astelias provide structure around the terrace – but predominantly it is a garden that is in restful harmony with the surrounding countryside.