Here at Tory Bush we are considering making the biggest hanging basket in County Down, really it is making use of some steel work we inherited, I will photograph the project as it goes on and post a blog later when all the flowers in bloom, if they do bloom that is, Jim and I are not exactly what may be called green fingered, lets say thank goodness for the recent wet summers we have had.
Jim is the handy man here at Tory Bush and from all those that have stayed the consensus is that he does a fantastic job. Talking about wet summers, about three years ago we decided to put window boxes on all the cottages and houses on site and at the time we made a device to attach to a hose pipe to enable us to water the boxes on the first floor windows, but would you believe it given the nature of the last few summers we have not had to use it once. Some may be thinking for a business trying to sell holidays in Northern Ireland talking about wet summers is not doing a good job, but I don’t believe anyone books a holiday in Northern Ireland on the basis of guaranteed sunshine, I believe our mild moist climate gives us other attributes in terms of vegetation, or peat covered mountains and of course the moniker the ‘Emerald Isle’, I also think it reflects in our personalities, the easy going nature of the people.
Johnny Cash had a song called The Forty Shades of Green , and believe me there is forty shades and many more. The song was a tour through Ireland from well known place to another but making no geographical sense.
I close my eyes and picture the emerald of the sea from the fishin boats at Dingle to the shores at Donaghadee I miss the River Shannon and the folks at Skibbereen the moorlands and meadows and their Forty Shades of Green
But most of all I miss a girl in Tipperary town and most of all I miss her lips as soft as eiderdown I long again to see and do the things we´ve done and seen where the breeze is sweet as shalimar and there´s Forty Shades of Green
I wish that I could spend an hour at Dublin´s churning suft I long to watch the farmers drain the bogs and spade the turf to see again the thatching of the straw the women clean I´d walk from Cork to Larne to see those Forty Shades of Green
But most of all I miss a girl in Tipperary town and most of all I miss her lips as soft as eiderdown I long again to see and do the things we´ve done and seen where the breeze is sweet as shalimar and there´s Forty Shades of Green
However back on track, we were walking through the grounds at Tory Bush trying to find a place to locate the biggest hanging basket in Ireland ! !, yes I am making that claim now, and we came upon the Fairy Thorn that is located at Tory Bush and I thought that I had never blogged about the tree so here goes. From old maps there was a fence, wall or hedge down through the field in front of the cottages, we have replaced that boundary albeit a few metres further out into the next field, but when ever the original boundary was removed there was a thorn tree at the start of the boundary and it was never taken away with the rest of the wall or hedge or what ever was there. There is a big superstition about Fairy trees here in Ireland and people won’t cut them or indeed dig them up. When I began this blog I ‘googled’ Fairy Thorn just to get some background and the following link is the first I came across http://ghosterelle.blogspot.com/2006/03/fairy-thorns-interview-wbarry.html and believe it or not I remember very well the incident mentioned in the second paragraph where an electricity sub-station had to be relocated because of the accidents surrounding the removal of the Fairy Thorn.
The local story was that after the first person broke their leg trying to remove the tree and after the remainder of the workmen refused to work on the boss said ‘poppy-cock’ or words to that affect, ‘I will do it, let me in that digger’ and as he hurriedly climbed the steps of the excavator in his muddy wellingtons he slipped and broke his leg. I don’t know if as many as four people broke their legs but there was at least two.
What my little bit of research did show is that the belief is more prevalent in Northern ireland as the following online definition shows.
| fair·y thorn (plural fair·y thorns) |
| noun |
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| Definition: |
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| Northern Ireland hawthorn bush: a hawthorn bush left growing in the middle of a field through fear that misfortune would befall whoever chopped it down |
