This month sees the formal opening of this great Irish garden to the public, with a range of modern facilities in place. These include a very handsome new visitor centre, gift shop and restaurant, and 16km of garden paths and trails, while work on the house, its four-acre walled garden, a new eco playground’ and wetlands walkway for dog owners is well under way, and the restoration of its Georgian glasshouse is scheduled to begin next year.
Certainly there’s a whiff of Bond about Congreve that inclines you to believe that glimmers of the man have been woven into Fleming’s best-known character. Famously dapper, urbane, witty and a stickler when it came to matters of social etiquette, according to his obituary in the UK’s Telegraph, Congreve worked in Air Intelligence for Plans and in Bomber Command and then in the Ministry of Supply during the second World War.
It was Rothschild – a man who once memorably described himself as “a banker by hobby- a gardener by profession” – who really sparked Congreve’s deep love of the quartet of spring-flowering woody plants for which his Irish woodland garden has since become world famous. Today Mount Congreve is home to more than 400 different kinds of magnolia, 1200 kinds of rhododendron and azalea, and close to 780 kinds of camellia.
A worthy recipient of the RHS Waley medal in 2006 for his work in cultivating rhododendrons, White’s long experience in tending to Mount Congreve’s world-class collection, combined with his naturally inquiring mind and voracious appetite for knowledge, have turned him into something of a master propagator and expert breeder in his own right.