WE HAVE TO SAVE MOUNT CONGREVE

At one point last month Ireland’s horticultural bush telegraph cranked up and spread the good and rather unexpected news that one of the country’s great gardens would be open again but just for one day. On Twitter and Facebook, in text message and phone call, a whole community heard that Mount Congreve could be visited; and they came in their thousands on an overcast Thursday afternoon to a corner of Co Waterford where the plantings made by one inspired man have become part of European garden legend.

The man was Ambrose Congreve, the last of the Waterford Congreves, who died in 2011 at the age of 104. It was his intention to bequeath the house and gardens – which cover some 70 acres – to the nation and he had made arrangements to do so.

However, after his death, just as the Office of Public Works were preparing to take over the property, a legal glitch was spotted and both the OPW and the Mount Congreve Trust are reported to be seeking a solution. The problem is said to revolve around the technicalities and timing of transfer of ownership. However. there is much local fear that the OPW, under pressure as all public bodies are, has no great desire to add Mount Congreve to the gardens in their care. The OPW press office has not responded to my inquiries at the time of going to press. (They did eventually, saying that it would not be appropriate to comment as negotiations are in progress).

In the meantime, one of Europe’s great gardens remains closed, the cost of maintenance met by another body, the Congreve Foundation, which manages the late Mr Congreve’s very substantial assets. The sale of contents of the house, last October, according to a local source, was necessitated by the huge cost of wages.

Mount Congreve was one of – surprisingly – four great Irish gardens which were created in the second half of the last century, not an era when you would expect such undertakings in a poor country with a dwindling aristocracy. Henry McIlhenny, of the Tabasco Sauce family, took advantage of the gulf stream at Glenveagh Castle in Co Donegal; Lord Talbot de Malahide coaxed an amazing collection of Australian and Tasmanian plants to thrive in the alkaline soil of the north Dublin suburbs; Lord and Lady Rosse of Birr Castle started a little earlier and were already helping to fund plant-hunting expeditions to China before World War II but their 150 acre garden, in the coldest part of Ireland, was essentially put together in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mount Congreve’s golden age, in terms of planting, extended for longer. Ambrose Congreve made his mind up to be a gardener at the age of eleven and he always claimed that his eureka moment had come when visiting the de Rothschild garden at Exbury in England. Both Exbury and Mount Congreve are conceived on a grand scale, but not a grand manner. In both places it was never enough to plant one example of a shrub or tree; lots of them were put in.

Ambrose Congreve started gardening on the family estate in 1918 and his enthusiasm never waned; if anything, it grew. After being sent to school at Eton and to university at Cambridge, he joined Unilever and started to display his exceptional ability in business. But he continued planting at Mount Congreve where his parents continued to live until their deaths in the 1950s.

The Congreves were not poor but they were not in the same financial league as the Beresfords of nearby Curraghmore or the Rosses of Birr Castle. Ambrose Congreve married Margaret Glasgow in 1935. Her father, Arthur, owned half of Glasgow and Humphreys, an Anglo-American engineering company which made a fortune supplying the hardware that went into gas plants throughout the world.

Soon, Ambrose Congreve was working for his father-in-law’s company, where he eventually became chief executive and chairman.

Even though he spent many years at the helm of a major company, and the war years with Air Intelligence, his horticultural heart remained in Waterford and he continued planting – always on a grand scale. If you want to see a plant, he would advise gardeners who had sufficient space to do so, put in five of them, not one. Or fifty of them.

Even in the flower garden the same philosophy is evident. Two huge, long borders packed with pink and white paeonies and lined with purple spikes of nepeta face each other across a gravel path. The scent, as you walk down that path, is almost overwhelming.

Ambrose Congreve almost certainly held the world record for the number of magnolias planted by one man. In the early 1960s he planted sixty Magnolia campbellii along one of the walks by the River Suir. Indeed, there is a mile and a half of magnolias, unequalled anywhere.

Although he was a great exponent of mass planting, he was not just a gardener but also a plantsman, someone whose fascination with the diversity of the botanical world was channeled through collecting.

The evidence is there to see. Estimates of how many individual rhododendrons grow at Mount Congreve range from 3,000 to 4,500 but whatever is the true figure this is almost certainly the largest collection of rhododendrons in the world. There are 300 varieties of magnolia, 600 varieties of camellia (who thought that so many existed?) and over 250 Japanese flowering cherry and acer cultivars.

All of these are framed, in a sense, by ancient woodland, the oaks planted when the Congreves first came here over 300 years ago and the other broadleaves put in by succeeding generations.

Thanks to the substantial wealth of Ambrose Congreve and his wife, the house and estate were unique in twentieth century Ireland, so well appointed and lavishly run were they.

After his father’s death in 1957, Ambrose Congreve gutted the house and created the kind of comfort within it of which most other owners of Irish stately homes could only dream. He also set about restoring the greenhouses in the four-acre wallled garden and soon grapes, peaches, nectarines were being grown again for the table and huge vegetable beds were interpersed with flowers for cutting for the house.

Guests were ferried to and from Cork airport in a Rolls-Royce Phantom II limousine, with hand-built coachwork, one of only two in the country.

Mount Congreve had, between house, gardens and nursery some seventy staff – a state which no other grand Irish estate had seen in over fifty years. The staff presented Ambrose Congreve on his hundredth birthday with a Wollemi pine, a recently discovered plant survival from the age of the dinosaurs.

At lunch on the same day he remarked that while there are many routes to temporary happiness, the way to be happy forever is to plant a garden.

Although there was no benefit for him in doing so, Congreve opened his private domain to visitors on Thursdays between April and October. At other times, visits were by appointment and he liked to test the knowledge of visitors by asking them to identify three unusual plants which he kept in pots by the garden gate. If you got all three right, you got the full tour; less than that, and the visit was short.

The wholesale nursery which he established in the 1960s (and which continues as a separate business) won many medals for its displays at the “plant Olympics”, the Chelsea Flower Show. It was fitting, therefore, that when Ambrose Congreve’s long life, so much of it devoted to planting, came to an end, he was in London for that very event.

He and his wife are buried in the grounds of Mount Congreve, beneath a little temple overlooking the River Suir. Let’s just hope that his generous gift to the people of Ireland is treated with the respect that it deserves. Mount Congreve’s significance as a garden means that it belongs not just to Waterford and to Ireland but to the whole world. The OPW and the Government must act.

My Passat Week

Whereas the largest gatherings of Passats in other countries tend to be in well located supermarket car parks or at conference centres, here in Ireland they congregate in significant numbers outside rural creameries and co-ops. Unsentimental and practical, the Irish farmer has a certain allegiance to the Passat and to the Toyota Corolla. Their fathers, of course, drove Cortinas and their grandads, if they had graduated from more sustainable forms of transport, favoured the Ford Prefect.

In Britain, those sales reps who don’t travel the motorway network in Mondeos and Insignias are to be found in Passats. The clue is the jacket hung up neatly in the back.

Gosh, doesn’t that sound dull?

And if you are to believe a certain kind of motoring writer (I’m a neophyte and a mere amateur, I should stress) the Passat is worthy, economical and unexciting. Possibly the difference between me and them (apart from their experience and knowledge, of course) is the fact that while I would quite like to test drive a Lamborghini, I don’t actually dream about such things.

Having spent a week driving the VW Passat 1.6 TDi Bluemotion and having taken on board the fact that stupendous fuel efficiency comes at a modest cost in terms of pulse-racing excitement, I was astonished to read one eminent commentator say that this car could be made to perform “properly” only if you changed up and down like you’re whisking eggs. I’m sure someone has cracked an unworthy joke about the fatigue detection system, which comes as standard, being required to stop the more frenetic driver from nodding off. (As it is, I didn’t get drowsy, so can’t comment on its effectiveness).

It depends what you mean by properly. My one was a delightful motorway cruiser (cruise control comes as standard), more than adequate on winding country roads and nippy enough for zipping around town. The real point here is that I managed 1200km on a single tank of diesel – and there was some hard driving involved. Also, I took three days to get the hang of using a sixth gear, even longer to try following the gear prompts on the dashboard. There is something counter-instinctive to heading up a hill in fifth, to be honest and I suspect that if you ignored the advice the fuel efficiency would not be greatly altered.

There are several things I really liked, such as the sense of space (the boot could hold several bodies if you’re that way inclined), the leg room is prairie-like and the doors close with the kind of heavy clunk that I have hitherto associated more with Audi and Volvo. The air conditioning is quick and unobtrusive. It’s a big car or, thanks to not being cursed with a posh badge, a “family car”.

Given time I might have learned to like, even love perhaps, the auto hold which obviates the kind of hill start which we all dreaded when doing our driving tests. As it was, it just caused me some confusion, as did the electronic handbrake (which played merry hell when it was first introduced). Flicking a switch rather than pulling a lever is a little unsettling for someone like me who learned to drive in a Vauxhall Viva.

As for looks, it has a meaner expression than its predecessors (the model was introduced in 1973, even before the Golf) and at a certain angle there seems to be a slightly sardonic (or is it just superior?) grin. This may have something to do with the fuel economy; it gives the car airs. From the back, to be honest, it just looks a bit bland.

I’d be happy to have an estate version – which would bring back memories of my Volvo driving days but with a considerably smaller fuel bill and road tax demand (a mere €109 thanks to those teeny emissions) and, bizarre as it may seem (I’m talking old Volvos here) more… er… exciting performance.

I suppose what I hanker after, at least in theory, is the Passat Alltrack, the intelligent person’s Audi Allroad.

The rather fetching Glacier Blue paintwork added €668 to the standard package, bringing the price to €27, 163. If I were buying one myself, I’d go for black, a colour as sober and as sensible as the Passat itself.

Winter in the Kitchen

We live on a hilliside in Co Cork between the valleys of the Bride and the Blackwater and from our kitchen window there’s a panoramic view stretching from, on one side, a great deal of West Waterford and, on the other, a vista that extends towards Mallow and the Ballyhouras.

It’s not just the view that makes it a lovely place in which to live; we also have our own few acres of woodland, a mixture of ash, sycamore, beech and the odd Scots pine and occasional birch. The wood takes more maintenance than I’ve given in recent years: you need to keep ivy under control or trees become top-heavy and can snap in a high wind and the paths become overgrown with brambles very quickly if you don’t spend quite a lot of time out with the brushcutter. I also need to take out quite a few trees which are growing too close together or which lean the wrong way. If I get around to it we’ll have free firewood for several years,

There’s something rather wonderful about having your own firewood. Fallen branches provide about 50% of the fuel we need to keep our two stoves burning during the colder, wetter months. All we have to do is saw them into suitable lengths and let them dry out a bit.

In the centrally heated and poorly ventilated environment in which so many of us live these days, we often forget what winter is like. Last Sunday I spent in the wood dragging branches down towards the yard; hands numb, mud-spattered but happy.

After a few hours of such activity it was wonderful to come back to the kitchen, the heart of which is the Aga (oil-fired and hence an expensive luxury); to thaw out in that domestic glow as the smell of cooking – winter cooking – filled the room.

Thanks to the Aga which not just heats the kitchen and our hot water but also takes the chill off the rest of the house, and our stoves, and plenty of insulation we’re usually warm enough to want to eat salads in Winter but we keep returning to proper Winter food: casseroles and stews, slowly cooked, transforming the tougher parts of animals into something sublime.

It’s a time of year which I associate with flavours like thyme and garlic which might join together with some cheap red wine or a bottle of beer to accompany shin of beef on its slow journey to delicious, melting tenderness. It’s the season when Irish stew (with carrots and pearl barley) cooked with the spuds on top, all in one, comes into its own. It’s when fluffy mashed potato, enriched with plenty of butter and a little hot milk (never cold or even tepid) is an essential for moping up richly flavoured gravies.

It’s also a time when we return to our roots, as in carrots, beetroot, celeriac and the like. Plus, of course, tubers like maincrop potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes. Yes, by the time Spring comes around again we are gagging for fresh green things from the garden (or even from polytunnels in Spain) but for a while the heavier produce of Winter seems very apt.

Winter is also the season of spices. Not those new-fangled ones which we have all embraced so wholeheartedly in recent years: chilli, ginger, coriander and their ilk. But the ones with which many of us grew up: cloves and cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice. Put those together with raisins and sultanas and some candied peel and you have the aroma of Christmas.

When there’s frost outside there will be hot whiskey (with cloves and lemon and brown sugar) and hot chocolate with marshmallows on top. There will be slow-cookers working their simple magic while their owners go out to work, and an urgent, nururing need to pour hot soup tenderly into frozen children just returned from school.

Yes, it’s Winter in the kitchen and I’ll be thinking of this as I saw the next batch of logs. (ends)

Give everyone their due...

GIVE EVERYONE THEIR DUE

This piece first appeared in the Irish Daily Mail in March 2012

Tullamore, having for decades given its name to one of the world’s most famous whiskeys, is to get its due. Or, more correctly, its Dew.

The iconic whiskey, which is second only to Jameson in the world market, has not been made in the Offaly town since the distillery there closed in 1954. At present it is sourced from the huge Irish Distillers plant in Midleton, Co Cork.

This will change within a couple of year as Tullamore Dew’s new owners, the Scottish distillers William Grant, are to build a brand new, state-of-the-art distillery on a 50 acre site at Clonminch, close to the town of Tullamore. It will be the first new distillery to be built in Ireland for almost fifty years and it’s tempting to see this as part of a renaissance in Irish whiskey.

Scotland has almost 150 distilleries and myriad whisky brands. Currently we have four distilleries. The French multinational Pernod-Ricard owns the Midleton Distillery which is home to such brands as Power’s and Jameson, Diageo have the Bushmills distillery in Co Antrim and Cooley, recently bought the the US drinks giant Beam, have distilleries in Co Louth and at Kilbeggan in Co Westmeath.

By the end of this year, that number will have risen to five, with the opening of the Dingle Distillery in Kerry and the new Tullamore one will be up and running by 2014, making a total of six.

The scope is obvious but the problem is that whiskey (we and the Americans call it whiskey, the Scots whisky) production is a time consuming process and once out of the still it has to be aged for a minimum of three years before it can be sold. This is the sort of thing that drives business accounts mad; they are used to dealing with an immediate return.

Just as Ireland was liberally dotted with local breweries a century ago, so it was with distilleries. Whiskey was regional. Dublin was all about Jameson and Power’s (Jameson, allegedly, being the Protestant spirit, Power’s with the lion’s share of the Catholic following); Kilebeggan and Tullamore were the Midlands whiskies, Bushmills was big in the North, and Paddy an other products of CDC (the Cork Distillery Company) dominated Munster. And of course there were lots of small names which have now vanished.

The twentieth century was, by and large, disastrous for Irish whiskey. At the turn of the century it had been a huge seller in the US so with the lunacy of Prohibition from 1919 to 1933 the bootleggers labeled their hooch “Irish Whiskey”. As a result, the image was ruined and Irish whiskey became synonymous with moonshine: coarse, rough, fiery. It has taken almost a century to get over this and effects still linger.

After World War II, the American market shifted significantly towards lighter whiskies; blended Scotch, already doing well after the repeal of Prohibition, was there to take full advantage of the opportunity. Irish whiskey was seen as too heavy and having simply too much flavour.

The first man to realise that things had to change in Irish distilling was Desmond Williams of the old Tullamore distillery (and whose family owned the H Williams supermarket chain). He returned from a visit to the US in the late 1940s determined to create a new style of Irish whiskey and thus was born the modern version of Tullamore Dew (which was named in honour of Williams’s grandfather, Desmond E Williams who was inclined to sign instructions  with the letters “DEW”. This lead to the legendary advertising slogan “Give every man his Dew”.

The Irish tradition in distilling was based exclusively on the pot still which looks essentially like the ancient alembic, the sort of thing we all think of when trying to imagine a still. The patent or Coffey still, ironically invented by an Irishman, is column-shaped and produces the kind of spirit which feed into the modern Scotch blended whisky brands (and some of the cheaper Irish brands too, of course). Irish whiskey aficionados tend to look down their noses at such equipment.

Ireland’s first ever patent or Coffey still was installed in the Tullamore distillery in 1947. It was a momentous occasion and an audacious attempt at modernization, which underlined that Desmond Williams was a visionary (he created Irish Mist, the hugely successful whiskey-based liqueur, the same year).

But the timing was wrong. It was simply too late to rescue Irish whiskey in general and Tullamore Dew in particular. The last truly Tullamore Dew trickled from the still in 1954. The distillery was mothballed and, in the end, never reopened. In 1965, the brand was sold to Power’s.

Within a year of this deal, things were so bad for Irish whiskey that the few producers who had managed to survive in the Republic – Power’s, Jameson and the Cork Distillery Company – merged as Irish Distillers.  But it meant that Tullamore Dew, as a brand, would survive.

Irish Distillers finally offloaded Tullamore Dew to Allied Domecq’s subsidiary C&C Group (which had originally been called Cantrell & Cochrane) in 1994. In turn, C&C sold the brand to William Grant & Company in 2010. The actual whiskey is still distilled by Irish Distillers in Midleton and is bottled by C & C in Clonmel (where they have their huge Bulmers/Magners cider facility). This arrangement will continue until the new Tullamore distillery is up and running.

Considering that Tullamore Dew is the number two Irish whiskey in the world (admittedly, pretty far behind the leader, Jameson), Grant’s got the brand quite cheaply. They paid €300million for Tullamore Dew and Irish Mist, then sold Irish Mist on to the Italian company Campari along with Carolans cream liqueur and Frangelico for €129million. So, Tullamore Dew cost the new owners a paltry €171million.

As to the whiskey itself, the policy with Tullamore Dew was, for many years, to stick with the lighter style of whiskey which is designed to be consumed with a mixer. This is what Desmond Williams had in mind way back in 1947 and it served the brand well even if Tullamore Dew was not highly prized amongst whiskey enthusiasts.

However, there are now some very serious whiskies under the Tullamore Dew umbrella, such as the Black 43, a seven year old blend aged in sherry casks and, ironically considering what Mr Williams did back in 1947, 100% pure pot still. This merely goes to show that there are fashions in whiskey just as in anything else and that the wheel does, eventually, come full circle.

Irish whiskey has, for decades, lacked the kind of sense of place that Scotch enjoys. Admittedly Bushmills has always been made in the one place, but all the other Irish whiskeys have been made in either Midleton or Co Louth.

Kilbeggan is being distilled in its home once again, rather than starting life in Louth and being shipped down there for ageing. Dingle, with its mild, moist microclimate is bound to yield a whiskey with what the French would call the “gout de terroir”, the taste of the place. And soon Tullamore will be distilling its native spirit once again.

It’s an exciting time for Irish whiskey and its potential is being recognized at last. This is underlined by the fact that all of the current brands are owned by foreign companies (French, American and British). Perhaps it’s a case of our not realizing the value of what we have until it has been endorsed by outsiders.

In any case, let’s hope that the new distillery at Tullamore is the first of many and that our proud heritage of distilling fine spirits gets… well, it’s due.