When I left ‘home’ to go to college in Boston so many years ago, little did I know my path would not be typical, life would draw me away, and I would end up adopting an old country, an old cottage and its old garden, too.
After college, after becoming married, after working in NYC, I left the place I had grown up — Katonah in Westchester County, New York, and went with my husband, a Dublin born writer, to live in the cottage my grandfather Breen left in 1910.
Niall Williams and I came to write and to paint and to make a creative life for ourselves, free from the furrowed business of Manhattan. The cottage was in Kiltumper in County Clare. It was over 200 years old and consisted of four rooms, each the width of the house, sixteen feet wide, and each with three-foot thick stone walls. At its center lay a ten-foot wide hearth with a grate on the floor.
When we arrived in that April of 1985, the house hadn’t been lived in for some five years and the garden was a brambly jungle. Inside, was the hearth and nothing else but an old sugan chair crafted without nails, held together by its frame and a seat made of twisted hay or sugans, sort of like sisal rope. Outside, was the buried garden of my ancestors, the long tall Breens, and remnants of previous gardeners. A rusted shovel head was embedded in the stone wall. The garden, 40 yards by 60 yards, slopes south towards the unseen River Shannon.
We adopted that sugan chair easily enough but it took some negotiating to adopt the garden. A dung heap scented the left side, just below the front door. A vigorous rhubarb patch with leaves triple the size of a garden spade grew at its edge. Onions and ribbon grass bordered one side of the path that led to a gate. A giant pampas grass, with its feathery plumes like the white underside of a fox’s tail, blocked the entrance to the garden at the right corner of the house.
Two centuries old, the garden anchored me to my adopted country. As spring turned into summer, and whitethorn petals gilded the road, rambling pink roses studded the stone cabin walls. One intensely scented, cerise-colored rosa rugosa bloomed center stage along the path as if to say, here I am and here I’ll stay. With
the help of neighbors we planted potatoes and cabbage and more onions. We didn’t change a thing, in those days. We made rhubarb pie and gave the onions away for pickling. And we ate a lot of potatoes. We were learning to adapt.
That first summer we attempted American sugar snap peas but the winds blew down our fence and the Burpee French beans didn’t move, stunned. We tried zinnias in the small patch of earth in front of the house but these rotted in the cold rain. We sowed lettuce seeds directly into the soil, never to see a single germination. Other gentle things like that didn’t come to fruition but the cabbage and the potatoes and onions thrived.
I had worked in a garden nursery in New York and thought I knew a thing or two about plants. You put your corn and tomato plants in the ground in the middle of May and you started picking in August. You added water and let the sun do its magic. But the west of Ireland is a long way from the fertile soil of Westchester County. The boggy land didn’t need water. And sunshine? Good luck with that. God placed Ireland at the brunt of the wild Atlantic, but, in his mercy, he positioned it so that summer light would not begin to set until ten o’clock.
The process of garden adoption is a process of adaptation. It was as if the garden was teaching us how to be with it. We had to get to know each other before it allowed us to nurture it in tune with our own natures. Now, we have raised beds, a small glasshouse for the tomatoes and basil, a glass-roofed porch for the zinnias, two compost bins. And a plastic tunnel has been talked about.
Kiltumper was a farmer’s garden in the beginning and although its yield of potatoes and cabbages has turned to delphiniums and lupins, when we stand at the cottage’s front door, we see it as a collaboration. It has continued to grow in unison with our life here, a life that has included the writing of a dozen books, paintings, several added rooms to the original cottage, and most serendipitous of all the adoption of two children. My life has been a series of adoptions, literally and figuratively, and in all ways the gift of adoption has become the mainstay of my life, my viewfinder on the world. The Kiltumper garden acts as a kind of glorious, colorful and ever changing testament.
It has become Home.