Among the ways we marked the centenary of the deaths of Patrick and William Pearse this years was by planting two trees in the walled garden. The first tree was planted on the 3 May in memory of Patrick Pearse by Eoin MacLochlainn, a descendent of Pearse’s half sister, Mary Emily McGloughlin. The second was planted on 4 May by Noel Scarlett, whose mother Florence was the daughter of Pearse’s half-brother, James Vincent. Special thanks to Kevin Hutchinson and The Tree Council of Ireland for supplying us with some Irish oak saplings. among the lines quoted at the ceremony were these from Pearse’s unfinished work, ‘The Wood’ (1914)

From east and west and north and south, from every airt from which the wind blows, by every aerial path that bird follows, they came answering their tryst: seed of the oak, seed of the birch, seed of the yew, seed of the sally, seed of the rowan, seed of the holly, seed of the rugged Irish larch. And each seed of them grew into a tree, and each tree produced after its kind, until there rose the towering ponderous oaks and the lovely dappled-lightsome birches, and until hard holly and Irish larch waxed strong, and every tree of the trees of the wood according to its season. Then was heard in the loneliness of the desert a new music answering to the ancient music of the sea, to wit, the Harp of the Wood playing very sweetly, very sadly, whenever its strings were plucked by the invisible fingers of the wind.