Growing in joy

The Tierneys’ garden may look a million dollars, but it was achieved on a modest budget. To suggest there was actually a budget set aside at all is misleading.

It was the “joyless” sight from the kitchen window of their Derrydamph house outside Bailieborough that pushed Natasha Tierney to take matters in hand.

“It was briars, rushes completely overgown - it was up to our shoulders,” she recalls of the scene.

They had moved into their house, a couple of miles south of Bailieborough in May 2020, and aside from a half-hearted attempt to sew a lawn in September, the garden lay idle for almost a year.

By October 2021 Natasha, who runs her own physiotherapy practice from a stylish cabin at one end of her garden, couldn’t look at it any more.

“I put down brushes and rakes and marked it all off - you know, like a professional would do,” she jokes.

The garden had to incorporate an area of lawn where she and husband John could play with their three children- Lochlann (10), Luca (8) and Robyn (4). That restriction helped define one boundary of her flower garden and she built up the remainder in phases.

“I wanted a curved path and I wanted space at the end where I could put a table and chairs. I knew it would get full sun, so I just marked out a little section.”

To create the path required paving slabs, but according to Natasha “we hadn’t a penny”.

“I’m big into manifesting so I just put pictures of paths on my phone - every time I looked at my phone I would think about this path that I wanted and I was asking the universe to send me the pile of slabs,” she says with a laugh, which may reflect the contrast in applying such a high-minded concept to obtaining something as mundane as solid paving slabs.

“Manifesting is focussing on a positive thing you want, and the idea is the more you focus on it, and the more you affirm you are going to get it, the more you change your behaviours, and it comes to you.”

And voilà - a few weeks later a friend’s father was upgrading his patio and wanted rid of his old slabs. Did she want them?

“Absolutely!”

Manifesting also yielded timber for perpendicular supports for climbing plants, and a greenhouse for growing tomatoes and strawberries.

Actually laying the path didn’t cost her a second thought.

“I used to do concreting in America,” Natasha says matter of factly. She picked up this handy skillset at home from her father when growing up “the far side of Relaghbeg”.

It’s the kind of handiwork, along with the manifesting that informs her popular Instagram account ‘DIYandDreams’. The finished path is sensational as lilac dappled tides of creeping thyme wash over them - you have to pick your step to get through it. Pollinators love them too.

“What my daughter does is say, ‘Excuse me bees’ and she tip toes across them.”

Every square inch of this section sees partnerships of complimentary colours, so for example at shin level the yellow of Lady’s mantles mingles with the soft purples of catmint. Further on these give way to verbascums, lupins and delphiniums while her rudbeckia is set to announce its arrival. Mallow and hydrangeas and other perennials will help to give height to the back borders as summer progresses.

“I like walking through the garden when I feel enclosed,” she says explaining her desire to create height.

“The whole thing about making a garden that looks pleasing to the eye is to have repetitive textures and colours, and a way of achieving that is to have the same plant in a couple of different parts - not evenly, but randomly distributed.

“Then the repeat pattern draws your eye around the garden.”

Natasha’s also conscious of maintaining seasonal interest.

“What I’m trying to achieve is early colour with wallflowers and bulbs, and then you have your summer colour and then later on we’ll have pericardia and the hydrangeas and other things that will come up.”

Again she managed to circumnavigate the financial roadblocks.

“Pretty much everything that went into the garden that year I grew from seed,” she says, noting the exceptions of a couple of roses she received as a 40th present.

“If you get enough perennials, eventually the garden will mind itself,” she explains.

“You are better off growing them in autumn so by the time they come around to spring, they’re big enough and then they’ll flower properly that year.”

Natasha used plastic milk containers to grow the seeds and then bought a cheap plastic mini greenhouse to move the plants on in December.

“Because I didn’t have enough grown to fill the whole bed, I had to grow loads of annuals in spring that are quick to germinate, and quick to come round and so I filled in the spaces with those.

“Every year I grow more perennials, and if I need more annuals I’ll fill in the gaps with them, but eventually I will have a perennial garden.”

With three young children and a busy job, it’s a minor miracle Natasha has been able to achieve this garden, and it seems there’s no end to her ambitions.

“I dream really big and then I put myself under a huge amount of pressure to get it done,” she admits.

“That wasn’t there in April,” she says of her latest eye-catching feature. It’s a slick series of dark stained wooden posts creating square spaces that follow a curved path with beds either side. It looks great now, even before the young climbers take over to soften their crisp lines. Avenues of Stipa ponytail grass border the path’s arc.

“Each one of those, depending on the size you could pay €12 you could pay €15 for them - and I needed about 30 of them. I did it for €1.95. Obviously you’ve got time, but the cost is €2.

“So I find it very hard to go into a shop and spend money now, because I think, could I grow it? Or propagate it?

“If I’m ever in a hotel and they’ve lovely gardens - snip, snip, snip, snip,” she says with scissor fingers.

“It’s very satisfying - when you grow a seed or propagate - I can’t explain the joy that that brings me. It’s priceless.

“That’s really the only reason I do it. Plus I like pretty things. And I have notions, and I can’t afford them,” she says with another hearty laugh. “I have so many notions.”

The Celt asks what she gets from gardening.

“Peace. I get peace out of it. It’s the only place I can come when I am worried or stressed or anything and my brain just stops thinking.

“When I go inside I’m a much better person! And sometimes my husband will say: ‘Do you want to go outside for a few minutes?’ Because he knows I will be myself when I come back in.”