Tending to an old reliable friend

Gardening

Have you ever asked someone their religion? It’s tricky. I finally ask Aisling Blackburn, ‘Are you this way inclined?’

“I’m this way inclined,” she laughs at the awkwardness of the question, “I’m definitely batting for this team!”

Team Buddha boasts about half a billion members world-wide, yet there’s still not a whole pile around Cavan. As such, visiting the Jampa Ling Buddhist retreat on the edge of Bawnboy still has a hint of the exotic about it.

Aisling has been a Buddhist since the mid-80s, and has been volunteering at Owendoon House since 1990. That’s when the property belonging to Margery Cross was repurposed as a meditation centre. Margery asked the Panchen Ötrul Rinpoche to become its spiritual director and it was he who named it Jampa Ling, a Tibetan phrase meaning ‘a place of much love and kindness’.

“I seemed to escape all the housework but I ended up either gardening or cooking,” recalls Aisling of those early days when there much work to do to restore the gardens that had largely reverted to nature.

There have been a couple of years when other gardeners took the lead, but as Aisling cheerfully notes, “It always reverted back to me.”

“They call me head gardener, but I say, head gardener over who?”

Today Aisling does have help from an American student, Emma, as each year Jampa Ling takes on an intern or two from Oregan State University. Apparently Oregan is a surprisingly good match for the Irish climate. Other times Jampa Ling welcomes ‘WWOOFers’ - international gardeners seeking experience working in organic systems.

Aisling also runs a community garden from 10.30am each Saturday. Participants get to pick up some horticultural tips and meet like minded people.

“People do terrible things,” she says light heartedly. “They dig up stuff and put things in the wrong place, oh God. But you also have the good stuff, which is people’s ideas and their involvement.

“So there’s plus and minus but community gardening is always rewarding - you are five minutes outside and you feel good.”

Aisling knows what she’s talking about having been involved with numerous community gardens. She fondly recalls taking classes with Drumlane Community Garden, run by Declan Fitzpatrick when it was first founded.

“They were such a gorgeous group of people,” she recalls. Inspired by the Drumlane experience Aisling tried to replicate it elsewhere, but with less success.

“I didn’t realise, as a horticulturalist you have to stand back and let everybody make mistakes, do everything wrong - your job is just to be there if they want to ask you.

“It took me years to figure that out. I thought, ‘Oh no, no, no, you have to do it this way’, and they hated that.

“So I learned from that one.”

She is putting that lesson into practice weekly in this garden and the volunteers appear to be making many more good decisions than bad.

One of the big attractions of the Jampa Ling garden is its walls. While most counties around Ireland boast numerous walled gardens, one of the few pleasant remnants of our colonial past, Cavan has very few.

Asked if the stone walls are doing their job in providing shelter, Aisling replies, “somewhat”, and notes the prevailing southwest wind.

“The wind can come from any direction but in Ireland it always comes from the southwest. But then you’ll have very nice west winds - they’re lovely, north winds are obviously freezing and east winds are the worst.”

She explains that plants close to the wall - which you would expect to be sheltered - is exposed to turbulence.

“If you really want to create shelter, you have a wall but then you have a lot of trees, and they break that big wind and turbulence. So our runner beans are tilting slightly to the left,” she points out noting their supports have been very successful this year given they normally take a battering.

While a large volume of the garden’s produce goes towards providing ingredients for the centre, Rinpoche advised Aisling she could run it more as a social outlet, which gave her licence to embrace her passion for flowers.

Aisling qualified in amenity horticulture in the Botanical Gardens in Glasnevin, which explains her urge to incorporate flowers where she can.

“Vegetable growing is only a small part of it, so flowers are really my thing - wild plants, native plants, flowers. So I integrate flowers wherever possible all of the time in between the vegetables. Vegetables have to look beautiful to me - although a row of onions,” she says her intonation rising with her appreciation, “seeing a row of onions, just perfect, that’s beautiful to me as well.”

With that in mind we set off to check out the harvested onions and just then Aisling spies a gentle giant submerged in foliage above.

“Oh there’s a sunflower,” she says, addressing it like it’s a puppy. “Hello hello, hiding amongst the apple tree.”

The sunflower is a fine example where ornamentals and edibles collide in the garden, another is the eye-catching verbena bonariensis that brings star quality to the herb bed.

“It’s a good butterfly plant - they love it and they are very long flowering,” she admires.

A clutch of ancient apple trees chime with the antiquity of the weathered limestone walls; likely to date back to the founding of the house in the 1850s. It’s a wonderful treat to explore this contained acre.

We reach a sturdy shelter, open sided on two ends with a corrugated iron roof, where the onions and garlic are lounging. Aisling remarks that Jampa Ling could do with improved storage facilities.

“That’s what I do, I teach people how to grow things, how to look after them, and store them,” she explains of the CMETB courses she takes. “Storing is really important. What’s going to happen to your produce if you don’t store it right? It’s a terrible waste.”

Compost is an essential part of the garden’s engine room and they have all sorts of different systems going on. There’s numerous bins, a New Zealand box, and most intriguingly a ‘widrow’ system - think wide row pronounced like a cowboy.

“This is our grass cuttings, weeds, twigs - anything you don’t want,” she says of the widrow heap. “I don’t believe in turning, I just believe in poking holes. We don’t even poke holes in this, but if we did it would definitely be faster. But there is last year’s,” she says of a widrow that has essentially become a raised bed next to it.

“It’s beautiful,” she correctly says of the texture of the dark soil. While the garden is far from fussy, Aisling eyes up a widrow she’s determined to “revamp”.

Would she not leave well alone?

“It’s not very tidy looking,” Aisling surmises. “I like the messy areas to be tidy - does that make sense?”

As you’d expect there’s loads growing in their polytunnel - crown prince winter squash (“it’s the tastiest), runner beans (“talk about bang for your buck”) and garlic chives amongst the highlights. But such is the magnificence of the six foot amaranth, all else fades to the background.

“It produces a-lotta-lotta-lotta seed here. You shake it out and buckets of seed will come off. It’s highly nutritious - it’s way up there of all the grains.”

A great source of food, and visually a stunner, it ticks all Aisling’s boxes.

After all these years tending to Jampa Ling, what does this garden mean to Aisling?

“I’ve seen this garden go through numerous cycles, yet like an old reliable friend it’s always there for me. The old walls host memories of people weeding side by side, sharing their thoughts, as they do now in this present time.”