From lindens to ‘Barry Lyndon’ — an Irish castle adventure

This weekend, Ireland is in my mind’s eye horticulturally, filmically and, in a curious way, spiritually. In his best-selling book Meetings With Remarkable Trees, the Irish landowner and historian Thomas Pakenham engaged with 60 stupendous trees and fascinated readers worldwide. In his native Ireland I have been enjoying meetings with remarkable others, with a remarkable avenue, plants and even a remarkable cult. They have Irish roots in rural Carlow.

The county has developed a vigorous horticultural identity that others might imitate. It holds an annual garden festival and links it to a garden trail across the county (carlowgardentrail.com). This very weekend it culminates with talks and teach-ins at Altamont, near Tullow, the site of the huge lake and garden once enhanced by their skilled owner Corona North. North was the daughter of Lecky Watson, a grower of fine rhododendrons from the Himalayas, one of which he named Corona in her honour.

This March, at Cheltenham, a horse’s name, Lecky Watson, was enough to impel me to a betting shop and back it in honour of Altamont. After processing my bet, the lady at the till asked if I realised that it was a 25-1 long shot and that it was only the third string for its trainer Willie Mullins. It looked third class in the paddock but led throughout the race and won. Forget crypto: bet on your horticultural heroes and you can multiply your stake 25 times in five minutes.

In July, still loaded with post-Cheltenham fivers, I went to speak at the Carlow Garden Festival, lecturing in a far from lowly cattle shed at Huntington Castle near Clonegal. The castle is an amazing survivor, having evolved from life as a military outpost under Elizabeth I and then Cromwell. Its facade and courtyard are impressive with flowery cosmos, daisies and abutilons, but its showpiece is the avenue of trees up its main drive. It is an avenue of limes, one of the few tree species unravaged by modern pests and diseases.

Kubrick stayed for up to six weeks in the castle in order to perfect this one short sequence. Fifty retakes of each small gesture drove his actors to distraction

In 1680, limes were planted on banked-up ground on either side of the carriage drive. They still stand there, well back from the modern approach, mostly the very trees with which the avenue began. They alternate between two varieties: a European lime, Tilia x europaea Pallida, brought in from France, one which many gardeners still grow and pleach, and a selected lime from the Netherlands resembling the one now known as Zwarte Linde. They mature to slightly different heights, so that the tops of the avenue alternate like the castellation on a green castle.

They also have different sectarian backgrounds. The limes from France came from a Catholic country, whereas those from the Netherlands were from a Calvinist-Protestant one: for Irish planters these differences mattered. I have never seen a finer lime avenue, nor have the bees which revel in its scented flowers in summer.

In the courtyard I met Alexander Durdin Robertson, the latest in the long family line that have lived for centuries in the castle. With his wife Clare, a notable artist, he oversees the opening of the castle and grounds to visitors and takes on much of the heavy work on which it depends. As we walked through his fine hydrangeas, always happy in Ireland, I admired the big-leaved rhododendrons, including the fabled sinogrande, prince of them all. Meanwhile he evoked for me his years in the Irish Guards and then his time as an oil broker in London until he succeeded to the castle and returned to run its comfy cottages and bed and breakfast flats and care for the untroubled waters of the river Derry at the gardens’ lower edge.

The setting of an old Irish garden can have an enviable serenity. As we emerged from waterfalls and ponds and a fine old avenue of Irish yews, I realised I had just seen this location on screen. On the grass before me Stanley Kubrick had filmed the scene in Barry Lyndon in which Barry refuses to abandon his challenge to a duel. From linden trees to Lyndon: Durdin Robertson recalled how Kubrick stayed for up to six weeks in the castle in order to perfect this one short sequence. Fifty retakes of each small gesture drove his actors to distraction, but the result, rescreened this summer, is a masterpiece, like the rest of the film’s scenery, interiors, lighting and camerawork.

Behind us we admired a rare yellow-leaved dawn redwood, or metasequoia, and a bevy of specimen trees, all Irish champions, including a cut leaf beech. In the courtyard again we had an encounter of a very different kind. Visitors in long skirts and jackets, decorated with signs of the zodiac, were gathering for ceremonies of the Fellowship of Isis, which worships at Huntington on fixed occasions in its calendar. Only in Ireland, you might think of this mystical cult, in keeping with wild ideas of William Butler Yeats and the baloney of the early 20th century.

Before its declared foundation in 1976, the cult had been maturing quietly with its founders for 50 years. The fellowship now claims a membership of more than 20,000 in 90 countries. They are not neo-pagans. They include practising Catholics and even some Buddhists, who come to worship in 12 shrines and five temples in the Castle’s basement — rooms, I later found, packed with bric-a-brac of ancient Egyptian, Buddhist and Christian iconography.

What is in it for gardening? In theory, a new view of the power behind it all. The cult began with Lawrence Durdin Robertson, then an Anglican priest, and his artistic sister Olivia. They elaborated an increasingly complex notion that a power of the divine feminine underlies all gods and world religions. In the era of theosophy and similar fantasies it did not make logical sense, but on venturing into its writings I have found anticipations of what have become rallying calls for a new generation. In Olivia’s words, after her series of visions in 1946, “patriarchy has led to wars, greed and the exploitation of the earth”. Male logic and analysis need to give way to female nurture and synthesis to save the planet: photos in the basement shrines show women worshippers sitting naked in the gardens to honour God as a woman.

So I went back out, wondering if the divine feminine might be helping the gardens to thrive. I saw no devotees at prayer, but two brown pigs came trundling out to eat fallen apples by a fence of sweet peas. Maybe we need to pray to the divine feminine to give our gardens some Irish calm, but the most I could deduce was that she was casting her fruit before bacon in the making.

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This article has been amended since publication to correct the name of the racing event that was attended and the name of the trainer of the horse Lecky Watson