Gardening COMPLETELY CHANGED MY LIFE
SHE MAY BE MARRIED TO A HOLLYWOOD STAR BUT CATHERINE FITZGERALD SAYS SHE LOVES THE UNSTARRY LIFE OF TENDING TO GLIN CASTLE AND ITS GARDENS
WHEN Catherine FitzGerald is searching through the gardens of her historic homestead Glin Castle, it’s almost as if she is piecing together bits of the past, the lives of her ancestors at the Limerick house on the banks of the Shannon. Catherine has made gardens her life but not just those at Glin – she has also transformed the likes of Hillsborough and Glenarm in the North as part of her work as a landscape architect and designer with her company Lutyens & FitzGerald, which she runs from London.
But the plants at Glin have a special connection to her own ancestors, who lovingly tended the gardens before her. ‘I know what my great-grandmother planted, I know what my grandmother planted, I know what my mother planted
REPORT: MAEVE QUIGLEY
so I feel a connection even beyond my immediate family right back to my great-grandmother,’ Catherine explains. ‘I never knew her as she died really young in 1903 or something like that. But because I researched the whole history of the house and gardens, I know that she and her father Lord Adare, who was from Dunraven and a great plantsman and plant collector, planted together. I know what plants he collected and I can see them in the garden.
‘I can imagine them there together saying, “Let’s do this”. I can see what year they were planted in and to me this is a wonderful kind of detective story. I found old diaries and things and photographs, I researched the garden he made in Kerry and it all fitted together.’
Our historic gardens are a collection of plants but also, thanks to the knowledge of Catherine and her peers, a collection of the lives of people told