The Irish Garden, April 2006, Volume 15 No 3
My Favourite Plant
Senator David Norris
in conversation
with Yvonne Gordon
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"I have a small town garden, which needs little maintenance. I have window boxes and a pond. I have things like miniature daffodils and cyclamen, which are absolutely lovely. They remind me of Cyprus, where I have a house and a little garden.
I also grow freesias, and I love them. They’re colourful, and they’re great to bring to people in hospital who can’t over eat chocolates – they’ve a lovely fragrance.
The other plant I love, and I have it here in Dublin, is jasmine. I have it in Cyprus and the perfume in the evening is absolutely glorious. I planted it myself and it’s now right around the door of the guest room. The rooms open into out into a central courtyard, so when guests open the doors in the morning or evening, they get this waft of lovely jasmine perfume.
My garden is just behind O’Connell Street and I can sit in it, with its shrubs and climbers - they really clothe the walls. I have a big old high dividing wall – the nice old 18th century, half-crumbling, mellow brick. I have put up a trellis and grown this wonderful montana clematis, which has a cloud of little white flowers in summer. It’s really lovely.
I have a pond and it has eight inner city goldfish from Paddy’s Pet Shop in Parnell Street. They have survived drought, leaks in the pond, being frozen over, and the attempted depredations of the local heron, and not one of them has gone! But I think they’re all either sterile or fairies because they haven’t had any children in the last ten years.
I got help with the pond and the layout of the garden from a friend who did a bit of landscape gardening, Originally the garden was derelict - full of metal, concrete and bits of cars. It was just awful.
I now have what I call a writer’s garden – it looks lovely but you don’t have to be out, triturating the soil and doing this and that. It requires a little maintenance but not too much, and there’s always something colourful in it.
Another thing I absolutely love is the birds - you see lots of finches and tits. There are always families of robins and they’re very tame – they actually fly into the kitchen and they’d eat the crumbs off your plate.
There’s also a wren that has a nest in behind the clematis on the wall, and she’s a real Maria Callas, a tiny little thing but what a voice. It’s lovely to think of birds because we hear so much about species extinction, ice caps melting and global warming. We’ve done such damage to the rest of living things on the planet, to see birds being able to survive like that in numbers is reassuring.
The other day I was going through Trinity and I was absolutely thrilled because I saw a big flight of Brent geese going over and on the lawn, a big fat mistle thrush. That’s lovely, because like the blackbirds and the wren, they are part of the sounds, particularly on a late Sunday afternoon, in Dublin. You hear the blackbird’s lyrical song or warning cry, and the mistle thrush has a beautiful song. It would be a shame if we lost it.
I enjoy my garden. I sit out and I have the pond and a little fountain. The sound of the water trickling, the sound of the birds, a whiff from the jasmine…I am three minutes from O’Connell Street, but could be in a little bower in the country. I’m very lucky – except it’s not just luck, because I did organise it."
Senator David Norris is a representative of Trinity College Dublin on the University Panel in Seanad Éireann, a founding member of the Bureau of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and a well-known Joycean scholar. His interests include human rights issues, environmental concerns and the preservation of architecture in Georgian Dublin.
© Yvonne Gordon 2006
