Diarmuid Gavin: The Waterford gardener who became one of the 19th century's most influential horticulturalists
William Robinson, who rose from humble beginnings, transformed the way we think about gardens and reshaped the English landscape
In the quiet countryside near Kilmeaden, Co Waterford, a boy was born in 1838 who would go on to transform the way the world thought about gardens. William Robinson was not born to privilege, and yet he became one of the most influential horticulturists in history — an Irishman who reshaped the English landscape, one perennial at a time.
Robinson's early life was rooted in toil. As a teenager, he worked as a garden boy at Curraghmore, the grand estate of the Marquess of Waterford.
From dawn to dusk, he maintained the elaborate, high-maintenance plantings that were the height of Victorian fashion — exotic hothouse flowers, regimented bedding schemes and manicured formality.
But even then, he felt something was wrong. Nature, as he saw it, wasn't meant to be clipped into submission.
By his early twenties, Robinson had risen to manage the hothouses at Ballykilcavan in Co Laois. Then came the rupture. According to one enduring story, he stormed out after a row with his employers and left the hothouse fires to die overnight — killing an entire collection of delicate tropical plants. Whether fact or folklore, the tale hints at the fierce independence that would define his career.
He sailed for London and by 1861 had secured a post at the Royal Botanic Society's gardens in Regent's Park. There, surrounded by the spectacle of Empire and the extremes of Victorian horticulture, Robinson's vision sharpened.
He hated what he saw: endless rows of red salvias, blue lobelias and elaborate carpet bedding — all costly, artificial and ephemeral. Gardening, he believed, had lost its soul.
So, he picked up his pen and began to fight back. Robinson started writing for The Gardeners' Chronicle, and then began publishing books with force and flair.
In 1870, he released The Wild Garden, a revolutionary manifesto calling for a new kind of planting, one that embraced native and naturalised plants, hardy perennials, wildflowers and the beauty of ecological balance. Let daffodils spread in meadows, he said. Let ferns and foxgloves flourish in dappled woods.
Three years later, he launched The Garden, a weekly magazine that became his mouthpiece for the next 40 years. It wasn't just a gardening journal — it was a battlefield.
Robinson used its pages to champion fellow naturalists, challenge powerful institutions like the Royal Horticultural Society and skewer his rivals. He was sharp-tongued and opinionated, but his ideas were catching on.
One of his most fruitful alliances was with Gertrude Jekyll, a painter-turned-gardener with an eye for colour and form. Robinson supported her when others dismissed her as too feminine or whimsical. Together, they shaped the Arts and Crafts movement in gardening, a gentler, more human vision of landscape.
Robinson's writing reached a crescendo in 1883 with the publication of The English Flower Garden. It became one of the best-selling gardening books of all time. Structured as an encyclopaedia of plants suitable for different garden types, it was also a deeply passionate call for change.
He urged gardeners to abandon labour-intensive, seasonal planting and embrace resilient, long-lived and ecologically harmonious gardens. In effect, he gave ordinary people permission to garden with freedom and instinct.
Flush with success, he bought Gravetye Manor in Sussex in 1884, a semi-ruined Elizabethan house with more than 1,000 acres. There, Robinson planted wild bulbs by the thousand, created orchard meadows, and filled his borders with drifting perennials. He lived there until his death in 1935 at the age of 96. He had no children, but his ideas survived him.
Today, Robinson's legacy is everywhere — in modern naturalistic planting, in the return to meadows and no-mow lawns, in the rise of pollinator gardens and climate-conscious design. Designers like Piet Oudolf, Beth Chatto and Dan Pearson all walk in his footsteps.
Even the Royal Horticultural Society, once a target of his ire, honoured him by renaming their journal The Garden in 1975. For Robinson — this feisty, self-taught gardener from Co Waterford — had redefined the English garden.
So if you ever feel the urge to stop pruning and simply let things grow, you're not being lazy. You're doing what William Robinson did — trusting the land and letting the wild back in.
Plant of the week
Allium
Ornamental onions are very cheerful plants that pop up their perfectly spherical heads in May and June. 'Purple Sensation' is a reliable choice with a rich colour. For something more dramatic, try 'Globemaster' which has giant lilac heads.
If you prefer white, 'Mount Everest' is a good performer. My own favourite is 'Christophii', star of Persia, a globe of beautiful starry violet flowers with almost a metallic hint to them. Plant in autumn in a sunny spot in fertile well drained soil or add some grit to heavy clay soil.
Reader Q&A
Can you grow wisteria from seed? I have a wisteria which produced lots of seed pods last year and was hoping to grow some more but nothing happened.
There's a much easier way to propagate wisteria — it's called layering. You do this by bending a long pliable stem that will reach the ground. Where the stem touches the ground, gently wound the stem by rubbing with a knife and now bury this part in the soil — if necessary, use a bit of wire bent to keep it in place. This will form its own root system while still attached to the mother plant. Next spring, you will be able to dig it up as a separate plant and pot up or plant elsewhere.
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Irish Examiner
10 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Jennifer Horgan: Our obsession with youth is a way of denying death, but we should embrace it
Did you ever enter a contest to see who could lift a corpse? No? Not recently? Maybe you wrestled over a corpse then, or played cards, handing the deceased their own hand. No? Not that one either. Ok, last one - did you ever hide under a corpse, shaking it to scare the incoming mourners - especially the kids. No? Well, don't worry. It's not you, it's me. In truth, these questions would only make sense to someone who lived in Ireland 100 years ago. We called them wake games and right up until the middle of the last century, these farewells to our loved ones were packed full of mischief, merriment, and matchmaking. It was a time for divine madness, drinking and kissing and the presence of mná caointe, keening women, who wailed and sang, lamenting our dead. To give you more of a flavour, one game involved someone donning a collar and sitting in a corner to 'hear confessions'. The 'priest' would act horrified, imposing an embarrassing and severe penance, which had to be performed for all to see and enjoy. Things got so bad that in 1927, the Synod of Maynooth 'forbade absolutely' unseemly and lewd behaviour around corpses. It all sounds a bit mad, doesn't it? Sex and death – all deeply Freudian. If you've spent time over in England, you'll recognise that we've retained some of our ancestors' customs. Plenty of English people find our open coffin and open-door policies around death unsettling. Their upper lip seems to only get stiffer around stiffs. Nonetheless, compared with 1925, Irish deaths in 2025 have become sober and sanitised affairs. Children are generally left out. Last week, I went to a Seed talk with Marian Ó Tuama, a Psychotherapist, who warned that children are better off seeing dead bodies early, particularly the bodies of people they don't love. 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Tell me, great-grandmother Horgan, did you ever inject poison into your face? No, seriously, did you ever inject your face with something that would make you look younger than you are? Ancestor of 100 years ago, your doctor or your dentist – did they ever put something in your face, Botox or fillers, to make you appear younger than you are? What's crazier? Playing games over a corpse or paying doctors and dentists to give Botox injections? Or put it another way – What's crazier? Accepting death as an inherent part of living and marking it as a whole community, or denying we age and die at all. What's more concerning, the cheeky sneaky Botox or the obvious Botox? According to a Women's Health and Wellbeing Survey, commissioned by the Irish Examiner, and involving over 1,000 women, 'one in 10 women states their GP offers cosmetic treatments and one in seven that their dentist does'. What do you think? 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Irish Examiner
18 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Chance to be part of Cork's €1.825m Red House's history
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But, the point was made, and not lost on his former pupil who assured his former teacher he had no intention of changing it, he just loved it, had always admired it, and wanted to rescue it. 'I knew the house for years, right back to college days in the 1990s when I lived across the road from it when it had been a family home,' says the Corkman who bought it intending it to be his own family home, having previously lived and worked in Hong Kong and the UK. However, his family and work life now with his US-born wife and children is in Dublin, so having bought, saved and 'lightly restyled' the Red House at very considerable expense, and having of late rented it at the very upper end of the corporate letting scale, has decided to part ways with it, ready for its next life chapter. Sitting pretty Red House has been here in these Property & Home pages before, variously called No 72, Red House, and more properly Lisheen. Red rag-order in 2006 We wrote about it back in 2006 when it was described as a 'Lady in Red, albeit more than slightly down at heel,' having had the ignominy, for a period, of being lived in by squatters who'd started chopping up some of the internal timbers for the fireplace to stay warm. Even despite its poor order of two decades back, it had carried a pre-auction guide/hope of €1.5m to €2m: this was back in roaring Celtic Tiger times when a Sunday's Well house had set a Cork home price record of c€5m and the country was awash in (borrowed) cash. High end finishes now It didn't sell, and so sat for a number of subsequent years, slowly decaying and came back for sale in 2014, all boarded up, faded (pic, top right), a shadow of once-upon a time more glorious days, and sold for €450,000 to its current owner, later described in these pages as 'a dreamer' for the scale of what was taken on. High level section links the now amalgamated home, part Georgian, part Victorian and wholly modernised The couple brought the highly regarded Pat O'Sullivan of Kiosk Architects on board, and then engaged Rose Construction for the herculean task of working with a period home inside and outside, on a challenging riverside and roadside site, in red-rag order, and one which was granted listed building status by Cork City Council after their purchase. Vaulted ceiling with ornate rose: the thorny work was done by Rose Construction Singled out for special protection were large ceiling roses in two of the reception rooms in the c3,800 sq ft 'home of two halves', part dating to the early 1800s, the other Victorian, dating to the 1860s and which at various times were used as one, and sometimes two, residences. The older Georgian/Queen Anne era 'half' also has one of the conserved plasterwork roses crowning a very fine vaulted ceiling, all in any case given due regard as was the owners' and architects' intentions in any case. (The vendors had previous experience of house renovations in older era homes in London and in West Cork.) Opportunity knocks Post the 2014 purchase, it took a few years before work could really start at Lisheen/aka No 72, also previously West View Cottage, and later West View Villa (and, 'the Red House' to the rest of us.) Its latter, finishing up staged were after a certain global pandemic hit, with covid adding to time lines, materials and build costs and restrictions. As well as using Kiosk Architects for the salvation and rebirth of Red House, the couple got full planning for a Kiosk-designed c 1,700 sq ft ultra contemporary one-off in a side garden on the property's overall c 0.25 acre site, and this was offered for sale in 2022 with a €475,000 AMV. Now, more practically, both the site with its positive planning history and the fully reborn Red House with up to six bedrooms and understated yet high-end finishes, top to bottom under a wholly-new roof down into a lower part-basement are rolled into the one package, with a €1.825m guide cited by agent Johnny O'Flynn of Sherry FitzGerald. Mr O'Flynn knows that he is selling a Cork classic, in a hallowed city suburb much valued by medics and other well-heeled professionals and where older era homes now tend to get very costly upgrades when and if selling on. The Price Register shows a half a dozen with a Sundays Well address selling for between €1m and €2.2m, with the boom time era €5m Woodlawn showing as a 2016 resale at €2.195 million. The house immediately downriver of Red House, The Hollies sold in 2016 for a recorded €800,000 and has since had a very costly makeover: the setting right on the river is what makes these one-offs of the Georgian and Victorian eras so highly prized. Red House has possibly the very best or most engaging of River Lee/Sundays Well views, not just from the grounds but from the inside as well: look west/upriver and you see Wellington Bridge/Thomas Davis Bridge and County Hall; look downriver and you see the iconic Shakey Bridge/Daly's Bridge: Cork's Red House is almost as iconic. 'At one stage during the work we had thought about changing the colour to more of a pink, but while we were doing the work the architects started getting letters from neighbours and members of the public saying they really hoped it was going to stay red, and of course it has,' say the owners who could possibly have had red blood on their hands if they veered of the original bolder lipstick red colour at this true on-off. The man behind Red House's full-blooded 21st century restoration and conservation says the first lease they got sight of was in 1804, between a Rt Hon Richard Edmund St Laurence and James Bonwell; then, a 90 year lease between the Earl of Cork and Ossery and a William Newman; next, in 1892, it was leased to a Dominick Daly by Viscount Dungarvan: 'I loved history and had a great history teacher,' says the 2025 vendor, still possibly afraid of being haunted by a certain history teacher, living locally….. Sherry FitzGerald's Johnny O'Flynn chimes in on the sale now to say 'seeped in history and known by Corkonians as 'The Red House', West View Villa is an imposing five / six bedroom detached waterside home, with so much space, it is hard to believe just how centrally located in Cork City you are.' Now includes off-street parking He says home work done here was meticulous, blending charm and originality with modern day comforts, and captivating views from just about every room, with a large double garage with remote control access for off-street parking and private garden on three sides, landscaped by designer Sean Russell. There are some pressed metal interventions in a vertical bay window treatments, one on the main river-and Mardyke facing facade, the other horizontal in the top floor span corridor, with timber sashes also, most with original window shutters. Flooring's a mix of solid timber, reclaimed and Victorian style tiles (sourced in Toledo Spain,) slate and cast iron insert fireplaces, a contemporary two- tone kitchen by Clohane Wood Products Skibbereen, and bathroom and sanitary ware from Bert & May, London. There are up to six bedrooms (two with en suites) and masses of storage on all levels, including a steady temperature lower ground level pantry/wine cellar and basement store, twin gas boilers, alarm and CCTV among the 21st century adaptations to a 220+year old Cork icon. Semi-basement pantry/wine cellar with storage access Selling agents Sherry FitzGerald add 'it's exceptionally rare that properties like this come to the market… even more so ones that have been so meticulously restored to such a high standard.' VERDICT: the only thing a new owner might want to do is change the colour…..if they want to be run out of town, before they ever get to unpack.
The Irish Sun
2 days ago
- The Irish Sun
‘All her memories are gone' – Woman left homeless after fire destroys thatched cottage in Cork as fundraiser set up
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