An Irishman’s Cuttings: Stories of Gardens and Gardeners, Plants and Plant Hunters

An ‘Irishman’s cutting’ in garden parlance has well-formed roots before it is detached from the parent plant. Like the garden variety, the cuttings in this book have deep roots in the gardens of Ireland and among plantsmen, of both sexes, with Irish ‘roots’. These cuttings are amusing, interesting tales of gardeners, plant-hunters and plants discovered near home or in faraway places, sometimes after great hardships. There are stories of eccentric, opinionated Irish gardeners and plants they cherished, propagated and passed on. A well-stocked garden in the 1730s had oranges and lemons, Cork had a botanic garden from 1808 to 1828. The Master of Belgrove in Cork, William Robinson, publishing The Wild Garden in 1870, a beautiful lady swapping parasol covers for funckias, and Praeger botanizing in the Canaries, are among these inimitable plantsmen. Another lady described herself as an ignorant small woman with a job six times too big for herA , yet created a beautiful botanic garden in Burma. And, the biographies are retold of some fascinating plants, such as the Killarney fern, the ‘last rose of summer’, and the tippitiwitchet, each with an idiosyncratic Irish connection. Each essay is an Irishman’s cutting in another way, having been first published in The Irish Garden magazine, for which Charles Nelson has written since 1992. They are all well rooted.