Cultivating a tropical paradise in Kinvara

Darren Ward’s back garden, lush with exotic banana plants, ferns, lilies and palms is more like something you’d find in the Tropics than in the west of Ireland.

But, says the Kinvara man, it’s amazing what you can grow in this country if you put your mind to it. He should know. Darren developed an interest in exotic plants about a decade ago through his hobby, herpetology – he has “a thing for frogs and salamanders”, he says. He also loves exotic birds and previously kept African grey parrots in an aviary in the garden.

The first exotic plant he ever grew was a Trachycarpus Fortunei – a Chinese Windmill Palm, which was a present.  After planting it by the aviary he got a brainstorm.

“I wanted to make the area a bit exotic so I got a Cordyline and then a hardy palm tree and then a hardy banana tree.”

So great did Darren’s passion become that he enrolled in Galway Community College to study horticulture – although by then he had gleaned an enormous amount of knowledge about exotic plants from books and the internet.

“I made a lot of mistakes along the way,” he acknowledges. “In the early days I was a collector and wanted everything, but eventually I was running out of space.  Over the years, I have learned how to get the combination right as my landscaping skills improved.”

The sub-zero winters of 2009/10 and 2011 gave him a blank canvas to re-imagine the space, as many of his plants didn’t survive.  Afterwards he got rid of the aviary and the sheds, creating more space.

The grey parrots are now in the house, where they make a fantastic racket and one, Forrest, swears like a trooper – you don’t hear them after a while, he says. There are terrapins in a pond in his front garden, while the back garden is a haven for butterflies, bees, hedgehogs, bats and frogs.

At some 50 feet wide by 25 feet long, this not a big space but it seems larger than it is. That’s because of the way it’s planted – with lots of large leafy plants and smaller ones providing ground cover. It serves as the showroom for his business, West Coast Exotics, which he runs in partnership with Renmore woman Caroline Greene.

Darren previously worked in Dangan House nurseries, but the work was seasonal and he wanted a fulltime job. The two are in the early stages of this venture and are working hard to get it off the ground.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.