Molly McKillop
RUNNER UP
Castlewellan Gold Leylandii
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Castlewellan Gold Leylandii prefers well-drained soil and full sunlight. Big, green pan loaves, dense with foliage, these sturdy outlines of a garden seem to have been sliced sharply. If you were to go to my grandparents’ garden in the rural North of Ireland, you would be enveloped in a maze of these colossal giants.
They cocoon a pebbledash bungalow - the ever bland epitome of Irishness. Yellow-green foliage protects small grandchildren from the danger of the road, whilst casting sunlight on a summer morning with a hue of Golden Delicious apples. They stand resolute now, in broad borders around the garden as if drawn in crayon by a chubby toddler fist. However, in their early years they require a good bit of mollycoddling, especially from gusts coming thundering down the glens. My Granda’s house sits in a town-land at the bottom of a mountain. Newly planted in 1981, these delicate little fellows were getting clean wrecked.
My Granda is loud and kind and has white hair that shoots up like a cockatiel's. We are very close. He and I approach situations with a similar attitude and we have a shared love of Salad Cream, but mostly we are close because of the week I spent unknowingly drying my face with the towel he uses to mop up spillages from his catheter. Some things just bond you for life. He built the garden for us all over the course of a decade each day after work. The rockery was finished in 1976 and trees on the far side were planted in '79. The pièce de résistance was to be a border of bright Castlewellan Gold Leylandii to kick off the ‘80s.
It was a late Spring morning, the swallows had returned and the sun dripped off the thick foliage of the Castlewellan Gold like butter. Each morning, my Granda had to reassemble his hedges, propping them up with bits of timber and tying them with twine. It was futile. A stranger from Belfast appeared with a lucrative deal. Sheets upon sheets of corrugated metal lay strewn across the yard. These would most certainly do the job. The constantly resourceful gardener shook hands as soon as he could. All day he hammered and bent and twisted and sweated. He built a strong wall of metal around the hedges, protecting them from the elements and ensuring their stability for years to come. This stranger had provided an excellent service, yet he had failed to mention that the sheets of corrugated metal were plastered in various slogans.
Brits out Up the Ra Smash the H-Blocks
The sheets of metal had been stolen off the Peace Wall. Belfast was some seventy miles away; they jutted against the landscape of sheep fields like Iggy Pop at an Alan Bennett Society evening.
To my Granda, this was merely an admin error and he didn’t seem to mind at all. He admired his handiwork and looked upon this new garden feature as some would a porcelain bird bath. This was 1981. The year of the Hunger Strikes, political alienation, and intensification of violence. 118 people would lose their lives in The Troubles this year. In a state as small as the North of Ireland, no one remained unscathed. To some - this might appear as an emphatic declaration of political opinion. To others it might appear as a mockery of the Irish struggle. All of a sudden this family were declaring ‘Brits Out’ just above the begonias. Even my twelve year old father, upon discovering the thrown together wall from the school bus window, declared this a ‘bold statement’.
Whether the wall’s service would have been required and appreciated more so in its intended home of West Belfast was besides the point apparently. Its history and reputation for protection only boosted my Granda’s opinion on the wall’s suitability for its new rural role. This great envelope of metal had been strong enough to withstand years of tension - surely some wind would be a piece of piss.
Our very own peace wall stayed up for three years. Who had the money in those days for fancy fencing? The wall made an unusual backdrop of weathered graffiti against the snowdrops and bluebells of the chicken coop. Eventually though, the words became slurred with rain, the orange melding with rust over the dips and bumps of the metal, and the green becoming one with the meadow’s slime. What was once unnatural against the stupor of the fields blended into the landscape. It battled three unforgiving winters and the Castlewellan Gold Leylandii flourished having been sheltered from the coastal wind. Thriving year by year, it now stands at over fifteen feet. It towers over you as you stand in the soft mulch grass, as my Granda once towered over me.
Despite protests from his family that this was all a bit mad and might lead to unwelcome attention - he would simply smile and say, “Well, we can hardly turn it round the other way, can we?”
My Granda is eighty-nine now. His garden is glorious and he sits reading the paper out there most mornings. God, I love him.