Flowers at Altamont

"These must be good for the soul," Finbarr says as I lean down to smell a rose. The vivid fragrance envelops me, and I file his words to memory, because they seem so true.

We're with his two boys at Altamont Gardens in County Carlow, a beautiful, 40-acre estate restored by a woman named Corona North before the turn of the century. Corona, as Finbarr explains, was so passionate about this land that she dedicated her life to transforming it. And transform it she did: Altamont is one of the great gardens of Europe, no longer a derelict wilderness, as it was when she inherited it, but a flourishing estate with a distinctly different garden at every turn.

When we arrived at Altamont, I think I expected something like the Irish version of Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina. But while Airlie is definitely beautiful, it doesn't hold a candle to Altamont. The diversity of the landscape here is matched only by the rareness of exotic specimens throughout the garden, which Corona collected on her travels and planted up until the week before her death.

In De Profundis, Oscar Wilde wrote, "With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"

Fortunately, I don't have a good answer for that, because I'm the happiest I've ever been.