It started with a blank canvas

The garden of Patthana, Co Wicklow, Ireland The home of T. J. Maher and Simon Kirby An exquisite small garden is rich in colour and texture and has been imaginatively extended, as you would expect of a painter's domain, reports Jane Powers

- Jane Powers

FOR more than 20 years, Patthana in west Wicklow has been one of the most exquisite small gardens in Ireland. The 19th-century granite cottage with its quarter-acre in the village of Kiltegan is the home of artist T. J. Maher and his husband, Simon Kirby.

Mr Maher has brought his painter's eye to the matters of colour, texture and composition to create a pair of perfect courtyard gardens full of luxuriant foliage and rich tones with-up a few steps-a miniature country garden of a lush lawn and pint-sized, harmonious borders. In 2020, the couple was able to buy from a farmer the adjoining field, a slightly sloping, three-quarter-acre rectangle with no features, no shelter and overlooked by several houses.

In the original space, now called the Inner Garden, Mr Maher had created a private, enclosed sanctuary with a few careful views to the outside world. Planting was specific to 'tiny little beds: everything had to be upright and off the lawn'. The new area, he explains, was a completely different character: 'A blank field. It was so intimidating. Where do I start?' Albeit daunting, the possibilities were exciting. There was space for a meadow, a pond, a tea room. More importantly, he could now grow whatever he wanted: trees, shrubs and -especially dear to his heart-all kinds of herbaceous plants. He had room to plant rivers and pools of tall eupatoriums, path invading hardy geraniums, cascading grasses, unruly helianthus and other space-hoggers. Although the field itself was empty, St Peter's, a Gothic-style church of 1806, made a pretty eye-catcher 100 yards to the north-east.