Plant Me! I'm Irish! Teresa Watkins March 16, 2005 Each year on March 17th around the world, everyone wants to be Irish... When visiting Ireland, visitors are enchanted with the lushness of the verdant rolling landscape and colorful flowerbeds. The fairy-like cottage gardens filled with lupines, snapdragons, cabbage roses, daffodils, Canterbury bells, violas, and ivied trellised walls that climb skyward to golden thatched roofs appeal to our sense of charm and enchantment. Dark green beech and stoic laurel hedges kept neatly clipped exemplify the clean, neat lines of formality and protocol of life within clan castles. Touring the ancestral homeland, you can feel the intensity of the Fenian people living off a harsh land but finding joy and peace in the simplicity and fantasy of flowers and fey folk stories. Walking among the quaint cottage gardens or the formal castle gardens can even inspire a fourth-generation Irish progeny to recreate their holiday memories upon their return home. Wherever your ancestral culture hails from originally, there are themes, plants, and hardscape accessories that will help you recreate your own ancestral garden. Showing your friends and teaching your family what flowers, vegetables, and trees grow in your native country is a great way to spend quality time and also keep alive the values and culture from one generation to the next. You may be surprised to learn that a majority of the plants grown in other countries will thrive wherever you live with the same sunlight and soil moisture conditions, and with proper maintenance. If you cannot purchase the actual plant species locally substituting similar colors, fragrances, and shapes for shrubs and flowers is easy by ordering through a good nursery like Plant Delights or a number of good plant catalogs. March is a good time of the year to design gardens that will help transport you out of your backyard to another world to relax and meditate or remember your own vacations or childhood memories. Gardens have been an integral part of Pakistan and India since ancient times growing from its earliest agriculture days to blossoming within Islam into ordered geometric grids called charbaghs. This style of Indian garden defines the garden not only as a landscaping feature but one which reinforces the spirituality of the Islamic culture, dividing the garden into four rivers — a metaphorical reference to Paradise — intersecting in the center of the garden. The four symbolic rivers are made up of water, milk, wine, and honey. You can create a Persian garden in your backyard by using tropical flowers, vines, and trees native to India. Walking through a charbagh, you will find orchids, azaleas, begonias, impatiens, globe amaranth, gloriosa lily, foxtail lily, ixoras, clerodendruns, plumbagos, crossandras, mussaenda, primulas, lotus, water lily, and clematis. Trees that do well in zones 9 – 11 include bauhina, cassia, tulip, and coral trees. Fragrance is very important in an Eastern garden and can be emphasized by using the many species of jasmines, such as jasminina sambac and tea olives, native to India. Enhancing the mood of the twilight in a Persian garden are bright mosaic tiles, flowing water fountains, reflecting lap pools, candle lighting and pottery, which can be placed to highlight areas of interest. You can plant and have your own tulip garden. But decorating your tulip garden with miniature windmills and Dutch girl and Dutch boy statuary and your imagination is immediately transported to the Netherlands. Add a small cement wall complete with ‘trompe loeil’ artwork of dripping water with a hole just large enough to entice a garden visitor to put their finger in. Not only will you encourage smiles and have an opportunity to relate familial childhood stories of dikes and Dutch family members, but you can also teach about Holland’s geography and history. Using large wooden sabots for container gardens of brilliant annuals serendipitously tucked underneath a shrub will add ‘magie’. Converting your backyard into formal or rambling European gardens depends on your own interests. What exotic country puts you into a mood to garden? Moroccan or Spanish theme can be easily accomplished in small backyards or patios with container planting of citrus trees in a stone courtyard surrounding rectangular pools. Adding wrought iron furniture and grillwork on fences, chimneas, and decorating with jewel-toned mosaic tiles on stuccoed walls or along garden paths to complete your design. Large ornamental shrubs like bougainvilleas, ficus trees, and climbing roses, with Mediterranean figs and olives planted around outside high walls to ensure privacy and shade adds to the Spanish ambiance. Oriental gardens are similar to Islamic gardens in that they require formality and attention to detail in maintaining the symbolism of the garden. But they are unique in that the Oriental gardening style has actually become a very popular art form. The Japanese garden respects nature and uses abstract representations through rock arrangements combining religion and philosophy. The Japanese Zen and bonsai gardens reflect nature in its original earthly appearance but in diminutive scale. Everything in an Asian garden is as you would find it in nature: water bodies need to be round and not flowing from statues but from waterfalls, trees sway in the wind and brave the harsh elements of the Himalayans. When in the first stages of designing a Japanese garden remember that balance, or sumi is very important in the Japanese garden. You can design a hundred mile long ocean vista within a ten square foot area if you use all the right elements, perspectives and sizes. Rocks can symbolize whole mountains, and your pool is a lake. Using rocks, raked sand and swirling linear creases in the sand can be envisioned as an entire ocean and mountains and river streams. Traditional landscaping plants are chrysanthemums, orchids, plum and cherry trees, junipers, camellias, water lilies, lotus, bamboo, moss, peonies, grasses, irises, azalea, wisteria, tea olives, pine, cedars, Japanese maples, and ferns. In the Japanese garden your hardscape items assist in telling the story of your heritage. Adding lanterns, stone basins, temple statuary, bamboo water features, and low bridges will add movement and structure to your backyard and easily transform it into an Asian garden honoring the traditions of your ancient homeland. The multiple climates of Africa, from arid deserts to thick rainforests, lend itself to a variety of African gardening styles. There is no end to the many plant species that are also native to the Dark Continent. Unusual succulents like euphorbias and aloes, bulbs such as crocosmias, gladiolas, and rain lilies. Towering tall palm trees hanging with baskets of feathery proteas blend with Transvaal daisies, aloes, amaryllis, crown-of-thorns, gardenias, periwinkles, and African violets. Edible vegetation like coffee, watermelons, okra, millet, figs, and olives create a wild but safe adventure of being on the African continent. Placing African clay pottery among statuary of wild animals, with hanging faux macaws in a large palm or baobob tree will seem to evoke the chimerical sounds of rumbling lions hunting their prey with the help of your outside stereo. Viewing your garden at night with the help of torch lighting from the safety of your cane patio furniture will set the mood that you’re not in the continental United States but at hotel in South Africa. Make sure you add hummingbird-attracting plants so that seasonally you will be able to espy one of Africa’s native birds, of course, only North American species. Mulches of large rounded river stones can finish off your garden display Finding inspiration to create a native garden from your homeland or your ancestral heritage can be fun and educational for families and you don’t have to settle for a tropical landscape, unless that is what you desire. Woodland, alpine and rock gardens can evoke wonderful vacation memories. Dining on international cuisine that teach customs and holiday traditions doesn’t have to be hard with your own specialized kitchen gardens for cooking your own cultural dishes. Imagine having container gardens with herbs and flowering plants from Jamaica, Mexico, Sweden, France, and Italy? Where are you or your family from originally? If you could have a wish, what part of the world would you like to have a garden in? If you would like more information on international gardens, click here. I’ve researched countries previously mentioned and include many more like Scotland, Thailand, Australia, Germany, and Iceland. You can go around the world in eighty minutes if you read fast and you’ll still have time to find some shamrocks before March 17th. Go ahead and plant them! They’re Irish and you know everyone wants to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day!

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Jeff Radel, CRS 'Make a Smart Move' House of Brokers Realty, Inc. 1515 Chapel Hill Rd. Columbia, MO 65203 Phone: 573-446-6529 Fax: 573-446-5408 jefrealtor@aol.com Website			Donna Adams, GRI, ABR 'Make A Smart Move!!!' House of Brokers Realty, Inc. 1515 Chapel Hill Rd. Columbia, MO 65203 Phone: 573-446-6530 Fax: 573-446-5408 dadams@houseofbrokers.com Website