For this week’s ramble, I have decided to turn my attention to a Lucan street that doubles as a time capsule. Primrose Lane begins a little past the Garda Station. To access it, you turn at the ivy-clad ‘Gardenville’ House on the corner and shed about a decade with each subsequent step. I’ve always thought of Gardenville as an architectural bookend to Lucan Village. The building itself dates to sometime around 1850. I remember coming across the name of the house when researching Lucan’s war dead from the First World War. Private William Philips grew up in this house. He would later serve with the Royal Highlanders before being killed on 28th January 1917. Today, he lies in the Warlencourt war cemetery in France.
The house is a relative newcomer on this road. Soon, I am walking past small cottages that have been here since the 1770s. Yes, there are some modern adaptations and add-ons, but this is a street that appears to be very much evolving with time and lives in harmony as much with the modern world as it does with its roots. I don’t ramble up here very much any more. As a kid, I occasionally went to the youth club that was here at the time. I know that my guitar made more than one appearance here in the past.
Soon, the houses end and the road turns into what appears to be very much a high stone-wall-lined country lane, overdraped with tall beech trees that dampen the noise of the busy village nearby. It is one of the most un-metropolitian scenes in the middle of this very metropolitan suburb. I am also very aware that I am climbing. Each step stretches out the calves a little bit more. The road is ascending Primrose Hill, another of the hills of Lucan that I have come to know since lockdown began.
It is not the primrose that I have come to see, however, but the snowdrop. On my left is the gateway into Primrose Hill House and the botanic garden attached to it. The slow walk along the driveway is quite magnificent. Here, beneath the tall, bare trees, are thousands upon thousands of snowdrops, each eaking out from the moss-topped soils to join in this snowdrop-spangled tapestry. Most are white. However, there are patches of violet and flames of yellow, all perfectly positioned atop the green moss beneath the strong brown boughs overhead. It is beautiful.
The first glimpse of the house comes into view as the driveway bends to the right. This is a regency style house dating from the late 1700s. Indeed, it is believed to have been designed by James Gandon himself. Eamonn DeValera was a regular visitor here with his friends the Reverend Dr. Irwin, possibly one of the most interesting people ever to live in Lucan and at one point considered for the Irish Presidency by DeValera himself. A plastic sheet covers a chalkboard sign on the doorstep that says “Garden”, followed by an arrow to the right. There is a small fee to visit the garden, but this is a small price to pay to help keep alive this sliver of our local heritage.
The entrance to the garden is via the small courtyard garden to the back. I move around a full wheelbarrow to gain access to the garden’s gate. My eye is taken with one of a hundred stone curios. A little earlier, across from the snowdrops, there is what appears to be a fallen headstone lying on a ridge. Here, there are three granite obelisks standing against the house behind a bush that has been topiaried around them. Immediately beside the garden gate, the bearded half of a broken granite head sits pride-of-place on a wall ledge in semi-magnificence. It does not at all seem out of place.
The garden is open in February and again during the summer. The February garden is a spring garden. I had read that this is a garden for the avid garden enthusiast and that you really must get down on your hands and knees to appreciate what is growing at this time of year. However, while that is true, and while it is true that the garden is very different to the drama of the snowdrops along the drive, I find that the beauty of this part of the garden is precisely its lack of manicuring. The leaves piled in the wheelbarrow at the entrance. The loose-edged rocks marking the path edges. The dead plants from last season. The emergent life pushing out from beneath the soil for spring. A garden should never be finished. A plant that has finished flowering may not yet have completed its purpose. There is a sense that this is a garden in the careful hands of someone that understands that the role of the gardener is primarily that of a steward and not, as I have tended to be in my own gardens, an interferer.
The current garden was planted in the 1950s and is tended to by the Hall family. Indeed, as I understand it, they are the fourth generation to tend it. It is in good hands. I will visit again during the summer to see how the plants have changed with the seasons as the spring garden gives way to summer.
Through a gap in the hedge, I realise that I am looking directly down the slope of the hill onto the Lock Road. I can even see the entrance to the lower campus of Vesey park from here. I stand up and look out over the lawn where I can see the higher lands on the other side of the Liffey. In the centre of the vista, I can just about pick out the spire of St. Andrew’s church. I can also see that the skies have turned from white to deep gray. One by one, the trees before me shake as a cold wind traces a path up the hill. It brings instant rain with it which causes me to abruptly bring my visit to an end. Soon, there are hailstones and a skin-penetrating wind of the kind that it could bring a rambler to a standstill.