We have a friend that comes here and she says: ‘You really live the dream, don’t you?’” smiles Jean Perry.

“And I think, ‘up at five o’clock in the morning? I don’t think that’s so dream-like.’”

Still, strolling through Glebe Gardens on a sunny day, where the Baltimore salt air mingles with the delicate scent of sweet pea, it does feel like you’re in a midsummer’s reverie of some sort.

“Can you smell that?” asks Jean, pausing to pluck a leaf. “That’s lemon verbena: we use it to make a lemon verbena mascarpone tart.

“This is hesperis matronalis – sweet rocket to you and me – a simple, old-fashioned garden flower. That’s cerinthe, feverfew, a few alliums there...”

It’s hard to believe that when Jean, her husband Peter and their four daughters – Tessa, Mia, Keziah and Jo – moved to West Cork 25 years ago, all that was here was a field fenced with barbed wire. But not only have the family established one of the country’s leading gardens, they also run a café that features in the McKenna Guides 100 Best Places To Eat In Ireland, not to mention hosting everything from intimate weddings to concerts for 400 people in their hand-dug amphitheatre just beyond the wildflower meadow that sweeps down to the sea.

Though when the family first came to Baltimore in 1989, having made their living as organic market gardeners in the UK, growing was the last thing on their minds.

“I was brought up on a farm and I met Peter at agri-college,” says Jean. “We had some land and we decided that we would be ‘good lifers’. But market gardening is relentless.

“We had lots of friends who were also organic market gardeners and they worked their children because that was the only way that they could make any money, but the children all left home as quickly as they could. We didn’t want to do that.”

A family holiday in Kerry – when “the sun shone every single day”– signalled a fresh start.

“We went straight home, sold up and came back,” recalls Jean. “Friends said: ‘You’re totally mad, you’ve only been there on holiday.’”

Indeed, when they came across Glebe House – a former rectory dating from the 1820s – it was far beyond their budget.

“At £150,000 punts, it was half as much again as we said we’d spend,” says Jean. “We really couldn’t afford it, but we just fell in love with it. We didn’t even talk to each other. We just said: ‘We’ll have it.’

“Afterwards, we went down the village and persuaded ourselves we’d do B&B, even though we only had three bedrooms and four children.”

Instead, they turned the old coach house into two holiday lets. But with six acres, it wasn’t too long before those green-fingers started to itch. As well as taking a job as a propagator at Creagh Gardens in Skibbereen, Jean set about sheltering the site with Peter’s help and putting in raised beds for an ornamental kitchen garden.

After a few years, they were invited to join the West Cork garden trail, which was when they had the idea to start a café for visitors, opening the morning of a local regatta – albeit on a shoestring at the back of the family home.

“We had a kettle,” laughs Tessa, who was 12 when the family first moved to Baltimore, “a couple of cafetières, four rings, a toaster and a dishwasher that took 45 minutes to run, and I think we did 70 breakfasts that first morning. It was terrifying.”

The quirky set-up soon earned fans, but at the height of the summer season of 2006, a fire officer knocked on the door to tell them they either had to convert the house to comply with current regulations or undertake a new build.

“We thought we couldn’t afford to do it – and we couldn’t,” says Jean. “But it was in the middle of the Celtic Tiger, so we put our little house at the end of the lane up for sale and we were able to use that money to build this.”

Which is where Tessa, Keziah and Jo stepped in. While moving to rural Ireland had its own challenges as children (“I had a crazy name, I wasn’t Catholic, I was English,” laughs Keziah) they had all felt the pull back to Baltimore.

“I lived in New York for six years,” says Tessa, who, like Jo, is a musician. “But I’m a country girl really. There’s something very real about a small community. I grew up in Baltimore, where you hung out with a 70-year-old fisherman and an 18-year-old school kid – just the people that are around you – so in some ways it’s more varied than New York. It’s ironic.”

Both Tessa and Jo started working in the kitchen alongside former River Café chef Gillian Hegarty, while Keziah returned from Barcelona, where she had worked in bars, to take over front of house. (Mia lives in Glasgow, but still helps on the admin side.)

But when Gillian left to take up a position as joint head chef at Ballymaloe, the sisters stepped up and together have steered Glebe Gardens and Café in to the McKenna Guides 100 Best Places To Eat list for the last three years.

“Though I always say that I don’t have to be a very good cook because the produce is so fantastic,” smiles Tessa.

Indeed, much of what is served in the café is grown in Glebe Gardens, whether it’s a simple tomato tarte tatin (Jean grows 25 varieties), savoury homemade ravioli stuffed with garden herbs and ricotta and sage butter – best mopped up with fresh-baked bread – or desserts like rhubarb cheesecake or rosemary shortbread with Rosscarbery strawberries, served on platters decorated with edible flowers, like pansies, borrage and nasturtium. Local producers like Caherbeg pork, Gubbeen cheese and Skeaghanore duck are also used frequently, as is fresh fish, with evening menus often designed around what’s available at the Skibbereen farmers’ market.

Open five days from March to the end of September, and weekends until December, the difficulty is trying to make 12 months income in essentially six. To counter this, they have had to be more innovative in how they use the space, from hosting concerts to weddings. Jean also offers a bridal bouquet service making hand-tied posies of garden flowers, runs regular garden club sessions and recently started a small nursery and farm-style shop on site.

“It can be hard,” acknowledges Jo, “but we’re a very close family. If you have a day off, you think: ‘Well, I may as well just sit in the café. Do the washing up!’”

For Jean, whose main motivation for moving 25 years ago was to keep the family together as long as possible, it must be gratifying to be surrounded by her daughters.

“For a while I was worried I’d make them rootless,” she says. “But now they’re really rooted here.”

And living the dream?

Tessa smiles.

“Aren’t we lucky?”