West Garden – Castle Caldwell

The original Castle Caldwell, Co. Fermanagh, Ireland

Hortus Praetorius

There was a time before this year’s Great English Monsoon (aka summer) when the West Garden at Castle Caldwell was a temple to Floribunda. However, the weather this year has been dreadful with June the dullest and wettest on record. Weather forecasts contain the key phrase “a month’s rain will fall in 24 hours” and at the end they broadcast the public service announcement “if you have been affected by the issues in this weather forecast, help is available ………”

Indeed according to Thames Water, our rapacious German owned water company which leaks like Whitehall and has trousered £5 Bn profits from its ill gotten monopoly since privitisation, during this time we have been experiencing a drought. I can only observe more people have died from drowning during this drought than all previous recorded droughts.

In the past, each June the garden would be an explosion of colour as roses bloomed, lilies jumped towards the sky and clematis entwined trellises. It would be filled with fragrance, butterflies greeting the salvia and bees the catmint. Alas, this wet summer and strange winters has made these halcyon days a distant memory.

For the garden as it used to be, see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/blooming-june.html

After last winter with the warm wet summer and mild winter it all got just impossible having to cut back the growth at the end of the season and we also had a dead tree and very little colour left in the garden. We also had a proliferation of weeds which were getting impossible to control because of the clutter.

Mr Squirrel at Breakfast

The deck and pergola

The pot garden on a pebble base

So I decided on a drastic change, had all the beds cleared out and turfed over. We then constructed two squares at the back of the garden (which gets the sun in the evening) - one a deck and pergola to use as an outdoor dining area and the other a gravelled area centred around the bird table where we have cleared all the pots off the patio and added some extra to make a display. 

We have also put two large bamboos in the corners to frame the view. The bottom line is the only things left planted in the ground is the grass and a single conifer! It is still a work in progress - table and chairs for the deck have still to arrive and grass has still to regrow - it is subject to intensive TLC by the Head Gardener or Hortus Praetorius as he is called at Castle Caldwell.

I have perhaps over- reacted to being fed up with the wilderness that passed for a garden. When we bought the house it was already landscaped and we kept adding things so it got cluttered and there were clematis, roses, honeysuckle on trellises on the fences which made 

them impossible to paint. I cleared off the patio by removing the pots and compost bin (it's now behind the shed) and built the arbour to act as a quiet area to read the paper and installed a water butt (The Great Butt of Castle Caldwell) with an interceptor on the down pipe to save water. As our water supply from said rapacious German owned monopoly is metered I note with some satisfaction it holds the equivalent of 40 watering cans. Out front everything was cleared out leaving only the cherry tree and the border hedge. There is a clean look to it all with plum coloured slate chippings laid over a membrane and just two hardy date palms in rather nice glazed pots to give a structured effect. Other than that there are two box trees by the front door and a hanging basket (actually on a rigid bracket) to give some visual interest and composition.

The front

The patio and arbour with The Great Butt of Castle Caldwell on the left

There you have it, a reduced garden we might actually use (when summer arrives!!!!) which is low maintenance and won't need to be added to or cleared out each year. We will miss our old garden but, as is common in broken relationships, it had stopped speaking to us some time ago. Blooming June is a fond but distant memory.

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Ringo

In February 2008 The Castle gained a new inhabitant and I wrote;

“Ringo is just the loveliest, lively, affectionate, very trusting, well mannered and house trained cat. I just can't believe we picked up such a nice cat in a rescue centre. He still scampers a bit and is not comfortable being picked up but he is settling in great and has given himself the run of the house. Because he is so active we have had to clear perches on the kitchen and bedroom windows but even then he is careful - he really has been no trouble, at night he goes into the bed in the front room but when we wake he is at the bottom of our bed but even then he is careful not to disturb you. I just don't understand how people gave him away.”

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/02/castle-cat.html

Well for the past four years that proved to be more than true. Ringo had been neglected prior to being rescued by the RSPCA at Blackberry Farm – his coat (he was a half long-hair cat) had been badly matted and he had conjunctivitis. He had been over 4 months in Blackberry Farm before we adopted him as visitors tend to want to re-home younger cats. We had been told that he was 6 but our vet said this was unlikely he was more likely to have been around 12 years old, pointing out to us these centres tend to be “optimistic” on ages of animals looking for new homes. More seriously when we got him home we noticed after a while he seemed to be in pain and his breath smelt bad. To cut a long story short the checks at the RSPCA shelter had not picked up that his teeth were rotten. Our vet was angry for there was no way Ringo should have been in that condition and he was able to remove a couple of teeth with his fingers. It made us and our vet wonder about his previous neglect and diet.

No matter, with his teeth removed he adapted, stubs grew back and all the time Ringo let us know how grateful he was to be with us. Coming home in the evening he would be in the window waiting and by the time we got the door open he was there waiting. In the evening he would be on the desk with his back to a warm laptop and then go into bed to say “goodnight” before going off to keep guard at the top of the stairs. In the morning he would come in like an alarm clock but somehow he always knew when it was the weekend and he could sleep in. When the Mistress of the Castle comprehensively broke her ankle and had to sleep in a bed downstairs for 5 months I put a chair by the bed in case the leg in plaster fell out. This became Ringo’s perch to look after his sick owner and he would not leave her until somebody else came in. How we wondered about his bladder control. Similarly when visitors came he always put on a display and introduced himself.

Deep down he was a needy cat who loved company, probably a function of being taken from his mother too early and the previous neglect he suffered. Sadly, he went off his food during December and we brought him for the usual checks at the vet where they tested for diabetes, kidneys, thyroids, etc; the usual cat health suspects, gave him antibiotics and a steroid injection. When he slumped again after Xmas we brought him to Hampden Veterinary Hospital (the one featured in the BBC programmes) where he was X-rayed and examined under sedation. Unfortunately they found he had two tumours on his pancreas and in his lung. In another 6 days he had lost 10% of his weight and we couldn’t let him continue to suffer.

He was such a needy, loving and affectionate animal that the place feels strange without him and I find myself going around kicking the doors and sad we couldn’t do anything to help him. This is a metaphor, my doors aren’t really good enough to kick but I had explored the symbolic loss when a pet goes before;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/10/should-we-mourn-cat.html

Nothing in this little tale should discourage you from taking on an older rescue pet. As we found when Ringo choose us with their hunting days behind them and their need for affection they make lovely pets, there was never any prospect of our little fluffy friend straying. Thanks, little mate Ringo, for the happy memories.