CORONA
NORTH turned the wilderness she inherited at Altamont, Co Carlow,
into one of the great gardens of Europe. Her single-minded passion
has evoked comparison with certain qualifications - with Scarlett
O'Hara's at Tara.
WHEN,
in 1983, Isobel Lecky Watson died at the age of 102, she
bequeathed Altamont House and 100 acres of beautiful but mostly
unserviceable land on the banks of the Slaney to her two
daughters, Diana and Corona. Everyone - not least Corona's
husband, Garry, and Diana herself - assumed that the estate would
be sold and that the proceeds would ensure a comfortable and
leisurely old age for the two sisters.
THEY HAD not banked on Corona. A passionate
plants woman, she set about restoring the largely derelict gardens,
took the arable land back in hand and, by dint of her own
unceasing labours and by chivvying, bullying and cajoling others,
contrived to turn Altamont into one of the best-loved and
most-visited gardens in Ireland.
ALTAMONT
boasts many rarities, but it is its diversity which makes it
unique. Man's - or, more usually woman's - hand has touched it
only so much, for Corona North's passion for the red squirrels and
the ravens which haunt the woods and the eels and otters of the
riverbank equaled her enthusiasm for plants of better recorded
pedigree. Immediately beneath the 18th-century house are the
formal gardens with their rose beds and pergolas, a giant
Wellingtonia surrounded by Portugal Laurel, planted to commemorate
Waterloo, a peony walk, wisteria walk, tulip trees and
handkerchief trees.
RARE
azaleas, rhododendrons and magnolias surround the one-acre lake
which was dug in order to create labour after the famine of 1845.
Beyond, the stream and the garden plunge into an ice-age glen of
sessile oaks and giant granite boulders. Here are rare camellias
and hollies, Chilean fire-trees, ferns and bog plants, but here too
unofficial fungi, wild daffodils and bluebells in season, and
startling vistas of the river below. All this North nurtured
through drought, storm and frost. She planted the last of her
collection of rare oaks only weeks before her death.
SHE
WAS born Corona Lecky Watson in 1922 at the height of the Irish
civil war. The family's several houses were spared because they
were known to be Quakers and good landlords, but two doctors
deputed to attend at Corona's birth found their way blocked by
trenches and trees felled by rebel forces, and had to run
cross-country, Gladstone bags in hand. A few weeks later, a band
of masked, armed men stormed the house and searched it for arms.
They demanded that they be given permission to search the nursery.
Isobel stood at the threshold and invited them to shoot her sooner
than enter the room and terrify the children.
AMIDST
the chaos, the naming of the new arrival somehow slipped the
Lecky-Watsons' minds. It was a nanny who pointed out the
deficiency some months after the baby's birth, and Feilding Lecky-Watson
glanced out of the window and selected the name of his favourite
rhododendron.
AS
THE daughter of a noted family of "thrusters" - the Watsons had
been masters of the Carlow for a century and had hunted and killed
the last Irish wolf at nearby Myshall in 1850 - Corona grew up in
Molly Keane land, hunting, fishing, dancing and making the annual
pilgrimages to Badminton, Punchestown, Cheltenham and Galway. The
Lecky-Watsons, however, had a less public passion. The family had
been amongst the more discerning patrons of the intrepid plant
collectors of the 19th and 20th centuries, and many of the azaleas
at Altamont are descended from these early gleanings.
 |
-
Source: Carlow
in Old Postcards Vol. 3 by Michael Purcell. 2000.
|
CORONA
like all her kind, scorned the "Anglo-Irish" appellation. She was
Irish. On the other hand, Ireland was part of the British Isles
and her links with England were strong. When the Second World War
broke out, therefore, she "naturally" caught the ferry and
enrolled as a Fani. She recalled often the pleasure of coming home
on leave on a train which would run out of fuel and have to wait
until the passengers had cut enough turves to build up a head of
steam.
RETURNING
to Ireland after the war, Corona gradually took over the running
of the demesne. She was never able to make a good thing of the
farm, but resisted all attempts to sell the land, in part because
she loved her Channel Island herd and the gloriously mixed fowl
which strutted about the gardens, in part because she loved their
produce. She would drink cream by the half-pint, and the menu at
her many lunches was nigh unchanging - pate made with Altamont
chickens and poteen, served on Altamont soda-bread with Altamont
butter, fresh Slaney salmon or, out of season, beef, and Altamont
fruit, again with cream.
IN
1965, when Altamont's great lake froze over, Corona held a party
at which she was struck by the stylish skating of Colonel Garry
North, late of the Buffs, a visitor at a neighbouring house. They
married the following year and moved into the old steward's
cottage above the river, which Corona extended ad lib with a
characteristic blend of elegance, impulsiveness and
impracticality.
IT
WAS on her mother's death, however, that Corona North's life's
work began in earnest. To her husband's grumbles, she moved to the
big house and then all but neglected it as she worked to clear
beds and Woodlands, to plant and to prune. Dawn would find her
feeding her fowl, working in the dairy, then putting in an hour or
so in the garden before breakfast in the bow-windows overlooking
her handiwork. Way into dusk, she could be found -or rather, in
general could not be found - in baggy corduroy trousers, battling
with bracken or briars in the glen. Garry would summon her with a
hunting horn, explaining, "Woman's evaporated again."
THIS
labour of love was rewarded by thousands of visitors to the garden
and pupils at the garden holiday courses she initiated and, at the
last, by the Irish government's agreement to take over the gardens
after her death and continue to manage them according to her
principles: "We want to keep them intact for future generations to
enjoy and to instil in them knowledge and a love of gardens,
wildlife and nature, and the necessity to care for and protect
their heritage."
CORONA
North's last words to her oldest friend, Rosemary Skrine were,
"Well, I've achieved what I wanted to achieve. It's safe now".
