Niall Williams - In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

In Kiltumper

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in United States 2021

Copyright Niall Williams and Christine Breen, 2021

Illustrations Christine Breen, 2021

Design concept by Deirdre Williams
Design by Phillip Beresford

Extract from The Essential Earthman by Henry Mitchell, copyright Henry Mitchell, 2003.
Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-718-1; EBOOK: 978-1-63557-719-8

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BY THE SAME AUTHORS

KILTUMPER QUARTET

O Come Ye Back to Ireland

When Summers in the Meadow

The Pipes are Calling

The Luck of the Irish

BY NIALL WILLIAMS

Four Letters of Love

As it is in Heaven

The Fall of Light

Only Say the Word

The Unrequited

Boy in the World

Boy and Man

John

History of the Rain

This is Happiness

BY CHRISTINE BREEN

So Many Miles to Paradise

Her Name is Rose

To our children, Deirdre and Joseph

The first lesson we might learn is that the point of a garden
is to be wonderful.

Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman

Contents

This is a book written by two people, a man and a woman, who have lived together in one rural place for thirty-four years.

It is a book that has come as a natural consequence of a decision Chris and I made all those years ago, to give up the jobs we held in New York and move to the west of Ireland to try and make a life out of writing and gardening. We were young then, a leap was not daunting, and although sometimes mystifying to us now, the decision then was lightly taken. Like most people I suppose, we knew very little of what exactly we wanted to do with our lives. We were only following a prompting in our spirits that we wanted to live true to our own natures, whatever they turned out to be. It was a purely romantic impulse, equal parts foolish and rapturous, and it turned out to be one of the defining moments of our lives. Back then, there was no thought given to whether or not we had any talent, how we would actually make a living, nor what it would really mean to try and live from words and earth in a rural place on the edge of Europe in the last part of the twentieth century.

That place was, and, as of today, continues to be, Kiltumper, in west Clare. It is where Chriss grandfather was born, and his grandfather too, and as far back as can be known. And so, for thirty-four years, here we have been, raising two children, writing books, separately and together, in joy and hardship both, Chris painting and drawing, and together, both of us making a garden.

All gardens, as Henry Mitchell says, are wonderful, and wonder is not quantifiable. Ours is not a show garden, not the largest, or most anything, but it is wonderful, yes, and one which is, for want of a better way of saying it, us. So much so, that it is hard now to imagine our lives separate from it, and easy to believe that in some very real and meaningful way a garden becomes one with its gardener, and vice versa. Places not only become marked by people, but people by places too. Landmarked, and spirit-marked too, the relation is mutual and essential, because born of love. Many of these pages will be trying to attest to just this.

To both of us, for reasons both general and personal, this has come to seem more urgent and necessary in the past year. We are writing at a time when it is tempting to despair of the state of the world. There is a deepening gloom that the planet itself is in peril, that this may be the last century of life on earth alone, that by the next one another place, another planet may be needed, because this one will be in the throes of a man-made climate apocalypse which will be past the point of rescue.

So, it has occurred to us that the best way we can deal with this gloom we sometimes feel for the world beyond the hedge line, the Earth with a capital E, is to focus on the one with the small e, namely the piece of earth that we are fortunate enough to be charged with tending.

In this way, that tending and nourishing and growing of the garden has come to seem the central part of our lives.

We say this, having a heightened awareness that this too may be coming to an end.

We are both in our sixties now, Chris is not yet out of her bowel cancer, and still in the throes of a daily injection because she is at high risk of spontaneous fracture. Nothing can be taken for granted. Then, this year Kiltumper itself will be in the midst of turbulent change with the arrival of the turbines of the wind industry, with their subsequent impact on the nature of the landscape and those who are living in it. Put simply, in the year ahead, when two turbines are sited on the hill 500 metres behind us, with their constant flickering and noise, we are not sure we will be able to carry on living here.

Recognising all of this, we have become aware of wanting to acknowledge to ourselves something of our life here, the decades of our being in this house and garden together, trying to make this kind of life, what that has meant, and continues to mean. What it means to try and live as writers, and gardeners, in this place and in this time in the world. Our children are grown and living in New York City. We know they carry with them this place we have made.

So, as we approached the cusp of a new year, we resolved to record twelve months of ordinary life just inside our hedge line.

The following pages are drawn first from both our journals, often brief notes jotted down at a small table at the top of the garden on a break between jobs, or written at the end of a day, or after a few days if we have been too caught up in the urgencies of spring or the abundance of summer. As in the gardening, and as is perhaps inevitable when two people have been married for nearly forty years both to each other and to a single way of life each of us have had a hand in the others work, commenting, editing, addressing and readdressing, much in the way we do the garden. Each page then belongs to both of us and to this place, from which they are inseparable. As a result, it is our hope that, above all else, this will be an expression of love, green-fingered and white-fingered, of gardening and writing, of two people in one place, trying to grow and to make something beautiful, and that it captures a glimpse of the way we are living here in Kiltumper.