The ideal time to read this book, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden, would be late December when we’re fantasizing about a new summer garden.
The next best time to read it is now, one of the hardest times to be outside in Oklahoma and trying to feel happy about gardening. That’s because this book is a lovely year-long meditation of life in a garden and the big WHY we do it.
I’m reading it now because I have fallen in love with the work of Irish novelist Niall Williams (especially This Is Happiness) and I want to escape the hurly-burly of daily life and float on his lyrical prose.
Some thirty-five years ago he and his wife, co-author Christine Breen, left New York and moved to Ireland to live in the stone cottage that has been in her family since the 1700s. Their tiny village of Kiltumper is in West Ireland’s County Clare near the Atlantic Ocean.
There they have scratched out a living writing, sometimes teaching, raising two children and always gardening. Now in their sixties, their lives are totally devoted to writing and gardening.
“Perfect!” I thought. “Idyllic.”
I was about to pack my bags when Williams wrote that summer in Kiltumper means five or six hours of sunlight. In December, maybe one and a half hours. And, there’s always rain. Always. Spitting, misting, drizzling, pelting or bucketing down.
No sunshine. Lots of rain. Check, please!
Their lifestyle of freedom is not easy, he writes. It’s fraught with “uncertainty, fragility, or the overwhelming loneliness of a garden in November rain.” More often, though, he rejoices in a lush, purple bed of perfect lupins with “a scent of staggering beauty.” And yet, in a chest-high mire of healthy nettles he recalls a line from the psalms asking why the wicked prosper. Air-acrobatic swallows return like clockwork and give them a sense of “continued aliveness.” Breen is a knowledgeable gardener, he the helper-philosopher as he describes a magnificent flowering Japanese cherry and its importance in Japanese culture “not for the flowering, but the falling of flowers, for it speaks to time and to all of our passing.”
A shadow on their serene garden life is the thundering sound of wind turbines being built so close the noise will shatter their quiet days. Breen needs the garden as a healing space as she recovers from cancer; Williams needs the stillness to write. The turbines will likely also disrupt the habitat. “What is the countryside for?” he asks, wrestling with humanity’s need for energy sources and how to honor the natural world.
This thoughtful memoir is about finding life through a garden. Income from writing is, in his words, “sporadic, uneven, uncertain.” The garden provides no income. What it does provide them, he says, is “soul-medicine” of beauty. Therefore, to them, “the garden is most valuable thing we have in our life here.”
The prevailing theme of their life in their Irish garden is joy. He writes, “Home is where you dig.”
