Passion in an Irish Garden
Three tales of jealousy, rage, love and loss
Most gardeners would happily admit that their garden was born of passion, of an intense desire to create something beautiful that excited interest, brought peace, and calmed the soul.
And yet the very word passion is a multi-faceted concept. From the Greek word for suffering, it implies a strong or even a barely controlled emotion – a disorientation of the mind, of the soul. It can mean everything from an overwhelming desire for, or love of, something or somebody; an obsession or mania; intense sexual desire; jealousy; rage; even extreme pain and suffering. So, what happens when, beyond our very proper gardening passion, something more extreme steps in? How might this affect the concept and creation of a garden and its landscape?
As it happens, three of the gardens we’ll be visiting in Ireland next June on my new Gardens of the Emerald Isle: A Journey through Ireland tour are the result of such passion – of intense love, pain, jealousy and rage.
Mount Stewart
First, a story of great love tinged with jealousy.
In the early years of the First World War, Edith, the young and beautiful Marchioness of Londonderry, began hosting weekly dinner-parties for friends at the magnificent Londonderry House on Park Lane in London – just one of the several family ‘piles’, others included Wynyard House in Yorkshire and Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland.
Edith’s dinner ‘friends’ included cabinet ministers, royalty, military men, writers and artists. These regular meetings of the Ark Club, as it became known, were intended to offer a temporary refuge from the cares of wartime. Rather than being a political or intellectual gathering, the Ark was deliberately light-hearted. In line with which, all the members, however grand, were given nicknames with an animal or mythological connection. So, Churchill was Winston the Warlock; the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was David the Dragon; the formidable Nancy Astor, Nancy the Gnat; the author [The Thirty-Nine Steps], spy master and later Governor General of Canada John Buchan, John the Buck and so on. Edith herself was Circe the Sorceress, the enchantress luring people to her house in the woods where she fed them before turning them into animals.
Lady Edith Helen Chaplin, Marchioness of Londonderry (1878-1959) with her Favourite Hound, Fly
Her husband Charles, meanwhile, was with his regiment, the Royal Horse Guards, on the Western Front. On the surface, theirs was a passionate and loving relationship, but all was not as it seemed due to Charles’s relentless infidelity: there was the daughter born to an American actress six months after his marriage; an affair with Consuelo Vanderbilt, the wife of his cousin the Duke of Marlborough, which only ceased following intervention from the King and Queen; and the notes he wrote to Edith from the Front asking her to forward letters to his various lovers. ‘You might send the enclosed to Eloise [the Countess of Ancaster with whom he had an affair lasting more than a decade]. Put a stamp on it and just send it off. That would be very sweet and dear of you’, ran one such.
For her part, Edith appears to have remained faithful throughout their marriage, rising above the gossip and betrayals. ‘I want you so much,’ she told him, ‘that I do not mind what you do’. Did she mind?
Dodo Terrace, Mount Steward
In the early 1920s and with a growing young family, the Londonderry’s decided to spend more time at their Irish country seat, the beautiful Mount Stewart on the shores of Strangford Lough. Edith loved the house and had been busy re-designing the extensive gardens. It’s a garden of extreme whimsy and is utterly delightful. A central feature is the Dodo Terrace, on which dodos (representing her father – a long story!)) sit either side of the Ark surrounded by sculptural representations of members of the club – the great and the good who still took every opportunity to visit. And among them, sitting proudly on his plinth is her husband – Charley the Cheetah. It would seem that she did mind after all, if just a little bit.
Charley the Cheetah, Mount Stewart
On Charley’s death in 1949, Edith found a letter addressed to her: ‘Thank you a million times for your love and support. I have been difficult – very difficult – but I know you have always realised my entire devotion to you.’
Belvedere House
Beware! This is a shocking tale. A gothic tale of cruel passion, jealousy and rage.
It begins on 7 August 1736, when the 28-year-old Robert Rochford, later the 1st Earl of Belvedere, married the heiress, 16-year-old the Hon. Mary Molesworth. In 1740, with the marriage already faltering, he decided to build himself a grand home, Belvedere House, on the extensive Rochford family lands in County Westmeath. It was to be a reflection of his ever-improving position in both Dublin and London politics and society.
But just three years later, in 1743, malicious gossip suggested that his wife was having an affair with his brother, Arthur. Despite Arthur’s shocked denial, Mary in her naivety admitted to the affair in the belief that it was what Robert wanted her to do – little realising that the shame and stigma of divorce would prove ruinous to his career. His vengeance was swift and awful.
Robert Rochfort, 1st Earl of Belvedere
Mary was imprisoned in a garret in the ancestral home, Gaulstown House, and separated from her children. Robert, abandoning her, moved permanently to the new, neighbouring Belvedere House. After 12 years of this captivity, she attempted to escape but was caught and subjected to even harsher treatment. When she was finally released, over 30 years later, on Robert’s death in 1766, she apparently took to wandering the house and talking to portraits as if they were real people. Her voice had assumed a peculiar quality (like a shrill whisper) and she was obviously profoundly damaged by her experience. She did not survive long after her release, swearing her innocence on her deathbed.
Arthur was sued by Robert for ‘criminal conversation’, a polite 18th century euphemism for adulterous sexual intercourse. Robert was awarded the staggering sum of £2,000 (half a million in today’s money) and unable to pay, Arthur fled abroad. On his return in 1757, Robert had him thrown into Dublin’s debtors’ prison, said to be ‘the worst prison in the country’, where he remained, at his brother’s behest, for 18 years and in which he subsequently died.
But still there was more. In 1741, two years before Robert imprisoned his wife, another brother George had completed his own bigger and grander house, Tudenham Park House, next-door to Robert’s. To add insult to the now disintegrated fraternal relationship, George later re-positioned his servant’s quarters to look out across Belvedere House. So enraged was Robert, that in 1760 in a frenzy of jealousy and rage, he built the ultimate ‘spite hedge’. Today, this would involve planting an impenetrable, fast growing hedge of infamous Leyland cypress (Cupressus x leylandii) growing anything up to 15 metres in 10 years. But this hybrid monster was still 120 years away from its accidental appearance in nature. So, what was Robert’s answer? A sham ruin, the largest folly in Ireland, now known as the Jealous Wall. 20 metres tall it takes the form of the side wall of a ruined Gothic abbey.
The Jealous Wall, Belvedere House
Robert, the awful ‘Wicked Earl’ was to die in mysterious circumstances in 1774, at the dead of night, possibly murdered, in the grounds of Belvedere House, leaving behind him a family in ruins. Hardly surprising then that two of his grand-daughters, Charlotte Dacre and Sophia Fortnum, were to become renowned authors of Gothic poetry and horror novels.
Kylemore Abbey
And finally, a tale of passion and loss.
While travelling through Connemara in the late 1840s, the newly married Mitchell and Margaret Henry – he Manchester-born, both proudly Irish – stayed in a hunting lodge on the shores of Lough Pollacappul, idyllically situated in the remote Kylemore valley. They returned frequently to enjoy the fishing of the Irish ‘Highlands’ which, despite their beauty, were a harsh landscape, scarred by the Great Famine, bankrupt landlords, migration and unemployment.
Mitchell and Margaret Henry
15 years later, on the death of his father, Henry, now a leading Harley Street specialist, inherited a fortune and, turning his back on medicine, took control of the family cotton business based in Manchester and America, later moving into politics as a champion of Irish social reform. In 1866, he bought Kylemore Lodge and the surrounding 15,000 acres as ‘a love token’ for his adored Margaret and with the desire to create ‘a nesting place’ for his rapidly growing family.
What happened next was extraordinary. In a little over four years, Henry employed over 1,000 local men, most of whom were desperate for work, to knock down the lodge, build a 33-bedroom castle (with only 4 bathrooms!), and lay down the most beautiful gardens including one of the finest walled gardens in Ireland. A very acceptable ‘love token’ it would seem.
The Formal Garden within the Walled Garden. Now fully restored and laid out as it was by Mitchell and Margaret Henry with only contemporary Victorian plants
But in 1874, just over three years after the castle was completed, tragedy struck. Mitchell and Margaret were on holiday in Egypt, cruising the Nile, when Margaret caught dysentery and died. She was only 45 and a mother of nine.
‘It is not our mistress we have lost, but our mother’, said one tenant as Mitchell returned to Kylemore with the body of his wife. Wanting to both commemorate Margaret and to demonstrate his undying love for her, Mitchell completed what they had begun before adding the most exquisite neo-gothic church, a little way from the castle on the shores of the lough. A cathedral in miniature, it is undeniably graceful and feminine in both its detail and decoration – a fitting memorial to love. Beside the church is her mausoleum in which, 36 years later, Mitchell finally joined her.
Beautiful gothic Church at Kylemore Abbey
Visiting Kylemore today you can’t help but be struck by this extraordinary tale of love and loss, a tale that is at the heart of the subsequent history of what is now Kylemore Abbey. For in 1920, the castle was bought by a group of Benedictine nuns who had fled Belgium during the Great War.
For over 80 years, they ran the Abbey as a highly successful private girls’ school which only closed in 2010. Today, the castle/abbey, still run by the nuns, is one of the most-loved tourist destinations in Ireland with an attention to detail and a sense of peace lingering on the air that would have made Mitchell and Margaret proud.
GARDENS OF THE EMERALD ISLE
A journey through Ireland
The Emerald Isle has the well-deserved reputation for being one of the most verdant countries in the world and its mild climate has endowed it with an extraordinary collection of gardens.
June is the beginning of summer, when the gardens and the countryside are at their most beautiful, and this new 16-day tour created and led by Mike Turner visits 15 of the most exciting garden landscapes to be found in Ireland.
