By: Denise Foley

Dermot O’Neill

The sky is as gray as soiled linen. Your lawn is covered with snow. It’s so cold outside that you have to dress like a member of Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition just to take out the garbage.

Wouldn’t you rather be strolling down the path of the walled garden at Dublin’s Farmleigh, the homestead of the founder of Guinness Breweries, inhaling the heady scent of roses? Or admiring the rhododenrons and magnolias at Glenveagh Castle in Donegal, overlooking the waters of Lough Veagh? Or taking a long, meandering walk through the Celtic Maze

Dermot's Clondeglass Walled Garden

at Irish chef Darina Allen’s Ballymaloe Cooking School (better yet, sneaking a handful of strawberries from her fruit garden)?

Dublin-based gardener, TV personality, and author Dermot O’Neill will take you to all of those places during his talk and slide show, “The Secret Gardens of Ireland,” on Thursday, March 8, at 5:30 p.m. at the Philadelphia Flower Show, which opens at the Philadelphia Convention Center at 11th and Arch on March 4 and runs for two weeks.

The theme for this year’s floral extravaganza is “Legends of Ireland,” and O’Neill is one himself. A founding member of the Irish Garden Plant Society, O’Neill has starred in several radio and TV garden shows in Ireland, written gardening columns for newspapers, and edits Ireland’s premier gardening magazine, Garden Heaven. He has also written several books, including Roses Revealed, the ultimate wish book for the rose-impaired gardener, that lists his top 200 roses for every occasion—with envy-inspiring color photos.

“I’m just mad about roses,” says O’Neill, in a phone interview from his home on the outskirts of Dublin. He’s also mad about hyacinths and owns the third largest collection in the world of these intoxicatingly fragrant spring bulbs. “I have 128 different varieties,” he explains. “Don’t ask me why. I think it was when I was 7 or 8 years of age and a teacher in school encouraged everyone to grow a hyacinth in bowls of water on the windowsill. I’ll never forget it. It was overpowering. There must have been 30 in the class and the look of the blue and pink and white flowers on the windowsill and the scent must have been what hooked me.”

Dermot's hyacinths

The hyacinths now fill the central walk at O’Neill’s own “secret garden,” Clondeglass, a 19th century walled garden in the foothills of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in County Laois, Ireland’s midlands. “I bought it about six years ago and I’m slowly restoring it,” says O’Neill. “When I got it, there were sheep in the walled garden. Still, it’s a very magical place, like ‘The Secret Garden,’ when it was all overgrown. I’m putting in drainage, paths, conditioning the soil, and I’ve started planting. I’m trying to create an old-fashioned romantic garden. I’ll include a small glimpse of it in my talk.”

O’Neill became enamored of plants when he was very young. “I was very influenced by my mother’s mother, who was a passionate gardener. I spent a lot of time with her. I followed her around and I think I learned by osmosis,” he laughs.

Like many of the exhibits at the Flower Show, O’Neill’s talk will be inspirational rather than instructive. Most Philadelphians can’t have a secret walled garden in the backyard, nor can we grow many of the plants that flourish in Ireland because of its perfect convergence of rich soils, the Gulf Stream, and rain (those rainbows have to come from somewhere) that produce a landscape that earned Ireland its title as the Emerald Isle. “We’re able to grow Mediterranean plants as well as those from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia,” says O’Neill. “I’ve actually been able to grow bananas without protection outside.”

But if you’re sick of wind-chill factors, parkas, and ash-speckled snow—and your next trip to Ireland is at least a few months off—it will warm your heart to go with O’Neill even on a virtual tour of Ireland’s secret gardens. It’s a lot better than just wishing for those warm days of ... January.

Links

Flower Show
Dermot O'Neill Online