We believe the best kind of gardens mirror their creators and echo the owner’s interests and passions. Like a green haven that has the power to evoke feelings in the visitor and where creativity is limitless.
Category: Out&About
A brief visit
The reason we have not written anything for a few days is that four out of six members of our family have visited Italy. It was a transition year school tour and we spent four beautiful and intense days in the area around Lake Garda.
A new beginning.
Work continues in our community for welcoming the Syrian refugees who are to arrive shortly. A pilot project, run by community volunteers has been set up called “Friends of the Centre”, Ballaghaderreen. The volunteers will work in collaboration with the Department of Justice and the Irish Red Cross to support the wellbeing and integration of the refugees into the Irish community.
Young swallows hatched in our garden last year.
Between worlds where nature beguiles.
We had a rare opportunity to spend a couple of hours on a North West Mayo Beach yesterday. If you travel past Ballina along the winding coastal road you soon come upon the Village of Killala, a wonderful place, steeped in history with a round tower and a quay that merits a visit in itself. But yesterday we drove on past the village and reached the beautiful Ross Strand. A large proportion of the beach is sandy but we headed left from the car park into the spectacular rock pool landscape. We are no experts on rock compositions and geological facts but it does not detract from the enjoyment and sheer wonder that can be felt in a place like this.
The messages say it all…
As most of you know the last few days we have been working on the artwork for the “Welcome to Roscommon” movements wall to welcome the Syrian refugees soon to arrive in the local community.
A heartfelt welcome.
Last week we were honoured to be asked by the “Welcome to Roscommon” Movement to create the artwork for the welcome wall project. As some of you know already, Ballaghaderreen has been selected to host a number of Syrian Refugees in a transition centre, where they can rest, recuperate and get to know their new country a little bit before being moved to permanent housing across the country. You can read about the many wonderful projects the Welcome to Roscommon movement are initiating to make this transition as positive and easy as possible on their Facebook page.
Another year.
It is almost time to close the door on another year in our little cottage. We are so happy to be able to live a simple life in the countryside, grow more and more of our own food and spend time in close connection with the soil. It is very gratifying to see the soil slowly improving as we add more organic matter to it. Our trees create their own mulch now and the land is changing into a very exciting place. Where there was only a field of creeping buttercups, we now have a multitude of useful plants and a wildlife haven.
Visiting the ancients.
There has been a short break in the blog posts on thegreenerdream. This is due to our recent holiday, visiting family in England and camping in Wales. We travelled on the ferry from Rosslare in the south of Ireland to Pembroke in Wales. As we want to be as green as possible we chose not to fly off to some far away country for our holidays, but to combine family visits with a few days of camping and visiting friends.
A long awaited gathering.
A couple of days ago we had the privilege and joy to share our home and garden with some long anticipated visitors. Josie is a member of our family that is 17 years old and autistic. For about five years she has been attending an outreach service where she spends time with other young people with additional needs. Together they cook, go to the cinema, go horseback riding and do many other things. Last year a few of the girls from outreach came to visit us for a picnic down by our stream, in the gazebo. Unfortunately it was raining and we could not walk around the garden as much as we wished but it was still a lovely afternoon.
A day in our beautiful Capitol.
After a couple of intense weeks, full of gardening, decorating, building and having friends over, we decided that a day away from it all would be nice. We set out from the train station in Castlerea at 8.18 yesterday morning. The train is a comfortable way to get to Dublin, with nice views along the track, a toilet if needed and a table for reading books on.
If you have a day to spare, or even just a few hours, IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is always worth a visit. It is very close to Heuston Station, where our train pulled in. The building is very big and used to be the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.There is a lovely Museum shop, a cafe and a beautiful garden to wander around in.
Our favourite visit to this museum was a few years back when it hosted a Frida Kahlo exhibition. Yesterday’s main exhibition was a bit of a disappointment to us; Grace Weir: 3 Different Nights, recurring. We found the work to be very pretentious, with the main theme, three different nights represented by three identical looking framed black squares spaced out across a wall. There was also a few different films, one in which a person who we think is the artist walks in a snowy landscape, takes a couple of steps, pauses, takes a couple of more steps, pauses and picks up a stick, takes a couple of more steps, pauses and so on…
We came away from this exhibition with very few emotions, apart from mild amusement and a disappointing emptiness. We believe art should make you feel and react, and there was very little of that despite Grace Weir apparently being one of Ireland’s most compelling and respected artists.Thankfully we were not allowed to take any photos.
Fortunately there were some more interesting exhibitions as well, the most moving being Shot at Dawn, a work by the British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews which focuses on the places at which soldiers from the British, French and Belgian armies were executed for desertion and cowardice during the First World War. There were names, times and dates added to the photos that were all taken as close as possible to the real season and time of the execution. It is very sad to think about all those soldiers, most of whom were just suffering from shell shock, who were killed in this cruel and unnecessary way.
We went to have lunch in the beautiful cafe, located in the cellars of the building, a place with a vaulted ceiling and very deep window niches. Satisfactorily refreshed we went on to look at the more permanent exhibitions, part of the museums own collection and to finish our visit off, we strolled around the garden. A walled place with very formal planting it is possibly as different from our own as any garden can be, but never the less a very pleasant place to be.
After this we still had a couple of hours until our train departure back home, so we walked over to the National Museum of Ireland, located at the Collins Barracks, for a wander around the exhibitions. It is in itself a lovely museum, well worth a full days visit. We were amused to find some old packages exhibited from Monica Duff’s, the well known former department store in the square of Ballaghaderreen, now closed for many years.
We came back home, full of impressions and with slightly aching feet. We love going to Dublin now and again, but what we love most of all is coming back home again to the wild, beautiful West of Ireland and our own house and garden. There is no place like home.
thegreenerdream 