Tag Archives: Historic Garden

Walking with Ghosts of the Past


In 1862 The Dublin Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden Company Limited was established with a capital of £50,000 by three men, the Duke of Leinster, Lord Talbot de Malahide and Benjamin Lee Guinness. The purpose of this body was to provide ‘an institution to afford, to the people of Dublin and its neighbourhood, rational amusement blended with instruction and thus supply a want long felt in the city.’ To this end, it intended to erect a building ‘of an ornamental and appropriate character, which would comprise a Winter Garden adorned with the choicest plants and exotics, and which would also be used for the exhibition of horticulture – for promenades – musicales, when required – a concert hall suitable for the largest concerts and for the production of the works of the most eminent Masters – a gallery for the exhibition and sale of pictures and articles of vertu – a department for the display of manufacturers and useful arts – a polytechnic museum and theatre for lectures on popular subjects, and especially on the natural and mechanical sciences.’ There would also be a public bazaar, reading rooms, refreshment rooms, gymnasium and so forth, all of which were to be located amidst ornamental pleasure grounds. From this proposal emerged the International Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures held in Dublin in 1865. A similar event had taken place in the city twelve years earlier when the railway entrepreneur and philanthropist William Dargan had underwritten the Great Industrial Exhibition held on Leinster Lawn. This time, the location was a 17 acre site running from Earlsfort Terrace and Harcourt Street, with Hatch Street to the south and the rear of houses on St Stephen’s Green to the north. In the 18th century, much of this land, an uncultivated piece of ground, had been owned by Joseph Leeson, first Earl of Milltown, and was known as Leeson’s Fields. Later, it passed into the hands of John Scott, Lord Chief Justice and eventually first Earl of Clonmell, whose town residence on Harcourt Street was just across the way from an entrance to the grounds: while he used this as a private garden (accessed via a tunnel under Harcourt Street), in 1810 his son sold the place and some years after, it was open to the public as the Coburg Gardens. Half a century later, by which time they had fallen into disrepair, the gardens were bought by Benjamin Lee Guinness and when the Dublin Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden Company Limited was set up in 1862, he sold the site to it for the same price he had paid.  





With the main buildings designed by Dublin architect Alfred Gresham Jones, the International Exhibition was opened in May 1865 by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and before closing six months later had received some 956,000 visitors. In 1870, two of Benjamin Lee’s sons, Edward (later Lord Ardilaun) and Arthur (later Lord Iveagh) re-acquired both the buildings and grounds behind them from the exhibition company, and while the site was used for another such venture in 1872, otherwise the gardens once more became private. As for the buildings, the vast iron and glass Winter Gardens were sold in 1882 and shipped to London where they were re-erected and opened to the paying public as the Albert Palace. Sadly, this venture proved a financial failure and within a few years the palace had closed down and was demolished before the end of the century. The other buildings were sold by Edward Guinness in 1883 to the Commissioners of Public Works to be adapted for the new Royal University. An architectural competition was held in 1912 for University College Dublin, with Rudolf Maximilian Butler selected as the winning entrant. His stripped-back Greek Revival design, with towering Ionic columns in the central breakfront and end pavilions, now conceals the earlier complex of the 1865 exhibition. Later vacated by University College Dublin, the Great Hall was adapted by the OPW in 1981 as the auditorium of the National Concert Hall. Meanwhile, as mentioned, the gardens to the rear remained the property of the Guinness family, whose Dublin residence, Iveagh House, stood on St Stephen’s Green (see In No Way Averse to the Magnificence of Life  « The Irish Aesthete). When that building was presented to the Irish government by the second Earl of Iveagh in May 1939, so too were the gardens to the rear, on the understanding that ‘they remain intact as a lung for the city.’ 





The Iveagh Gardens, as they are now known, were designed by Ninian Niven, a well-known landscape gardener and former Director of the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin. Born in Glasgow, in 1827 Niven was offered the position of head gardener of the grounds of the official residence of the chief secretary for Ireland in the Phoenix Park, Dublin: here he remained until appointed to the Botanic Gardens in 1834. He left that position after four years to establish his own highly successful nursery as well as designing the gardens of a number of Irish country houses. When it came to the grounds of the International Exhibition grounds, Niven opted for a style that mixed French and English traditions, a blend of formality and informality that allowed him to include a variety of different elements within a single space. On the north side of the site, for example, is a sunken lawn with a drop of five feet that originally served as an archery field, a rare surviving example of this once popular feature. On the south side, meanwhile, can be found both a rosarium and a Yew maze, the latter being a miniature copy of the one at Hampton Court, London. Between these lies a central walk, with fountains on either side and, at the west end, a cascade that flows over a rockery incorporating stones from each of Ireland’s 32 counties. The west end, abutting what is now the National Concert Hall, has an American gardens, replete with walks through specimen trees and past what remains of statuary first placed here for the International Exhibition. While these grounds were much used while University College Dublin was based in Earlsfort Terrace, from the late 1960s onwards its campus moved to a new site at Belfield, south of the city centre, the gardens were largely forgotten and overlooked. In 1991, they were placed under the management of the Office of Public Works (OPW) and opened to the public in 1992, with the cascade restored in 1996, and a new entrance on the south side, opened on Upper Hatch Street in 2003. Today, the Iveagh Gardens are a popular destination for office workers in this part of Dublin, but there are still times, especially soon after the gates open, when it is possible to walk around the grounds alone except for ghosts of the past. 

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Step into the Garden



After last Monday’s post about the house on Fota Island, County Cork, it is worth noting that the immediate demesne, including one of Ireland’s most important late 19th/early 20th century arboretums, also survives and can be visited. To the rear of the main building lie a series of walled gardens which have been well-maintained by the Office of Public Works and at the top of these the Irish Heritage Trust has restored a series of greenhouses now filled with plants. In consequence, the site provides an opportunity to explore an Irish country house in its original setting, something not always possible.


A Labour of Love


Running to some 62 acres, Powerscourt, County Wicklow is unquestionably Ireland’s most famous – and most photographed – country house garden, but what can be seen here today is of relatively recent origin. The building around which it was created has origins in a medieval tower house constructed by the de la Poers, whence derives the site’s name. In the 1730s, this structure was encased in a large Palladian house designed for Richard Wingfield, first Viscount Powerscourt by the architect Richard Castle. But the surrounding landscape remained largely unadorned, the ground behind the building dropping down to a large, irregular stretch of water called Juggy’s Pond, beyond which the vista was closed by the distant Sugarloaf Mountain. Only in the 19th century did the scene begin to change, initially thanks to the sixth Viscount who in 1843 employed architect and landscape designer Daniel Robertson to produce plans that would divide the sloping ground into a series of Italianate terraces, supposedly inspired by those at the Villa Butera (now Trabia) in Sicily. In a book about the estate that he published in 1907, the seventh viscount remembered being brought from his schoolroom one October morning to lay the first stone of this scheme. He also recalled how Robertson, who was forever in debt, would periodically have to hide in one of Powerscourt’s domes when the Sheriff’s officers came to arrest him. As for the gardens, Robertson, who found himself better able to work after sufficient quantities of alcohol had been consumed, in consequence suffered from gout. As a result, he ‘used to be wheeled out on the Terrace in a wheelbarrow, with a bottle of sherry, and as long as that lasted he was able to design and direct the workmen, but when the sherry was finished, he collapsed and was incapable of working till the drunken fit evaporated.’ However, in 1844 the sixth viscount, who had travelled to Italy to buy vases and sculptures for the intended garden, died of consumption before reaching home. Work on the site stopped during his young heir’s minority and it was not until the latter had reached adulthood in 1858 and assumed responsibility for the estate that the garden once more began to receive attention. 





By the time the seventh Viscount Powerscourt started taking an active interest in the gardens of his country house, Daniel Robertson had died. However, the estate’s owner took a keen interest in finishing the incomplete job, visiting a number of key sites in Europe, such as the gardens at Versailles as well as those around the Schönbrunn Palace outside Vienna and the Schwetzingen Palace near Mannheim. He also consulted a number of landscape gardeners such as James Howe and William Brodrick Thomas. The second of these was also employed by Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace and Sandringham in Norfolk. In the end, however, it was largely Lord Powerscourt himself and his Scottish head gardener, Alexander Robertson (no relation of the previously mentioned Daniel) who drew up their own scheme. Robertson, described by his employer as a very clever man with ‘more taste than any man of his class that I ever saw’ died in 1860 but by then the main outlines of the project had been agreed, and work started, not least on creating the terraces, on which it seems 100 men laboured for ten years. Lord Powerscourt reported that one of the difficulties faced was that because the ground had once been part of a glacier moraine, water kept coming to the surface of the ground and threatening to wash away the work; Robertson proposed thatbefore anything else was done, holes be dug at the back of each terrace so that the water inside, on coming to the surface ‘should fall down through the holes into the next stratum and disappear. This was done and we had no more trouble.’ Similar feats of engineering had to be undertaken to transform what had hitherto been Juggy’s Pond into the basin seen today: inspired by Bernini’s Triton Fountain in Rome, it has a central jet which can reach 100 feet. Another key feature added during this period is the Perron, a terrace situated part of the way down the central walk to the basin, designed by the English architect and astronomer Francis Penrose. This was intended to offer a viewing platform to what lies beyond, but also to break the monotony of the descent. The Perron has elaborate geometric mosaic paving, finished in 1875 and made from different coloured pebbles collected on the nearby beach at Bray. Meanwhile, Lord Powerscourt had continued to add to the collection of statuary and urns begun by his father, buying old pieces and commissioning new ones: the pair of figures representing Victory and Fame were made for him in 1866 by Hugo Hagen in Berlin: the same sculptor was also responsible for the pegasi down by the basin’s edge.





Lord Powerscourt never stopped adding new features to the grounds of Powerscourt, which extend much further than is indicated here. It is said that he did so because for a long time he and his wife had no children, and he did not want to leave anything for his somewhat disreputable younger brother Lewis Wingfield (and then, after 16 years of marriage, Lady Powerscourt had five children in succession).  After he died in 1904, the family struggled to maintain the estate and eventually, in 1961 it was sold to the Slazenger family, which owns it still although, as is well known, the house was tragically gutted by fire in 1974. But the gardens remain much as they were during the seventh viscount’s time and draw large numbers of visitors. The pictures shown today were taken on a rare occasion when the grounds were entirely empty, allowing the Irish Aesthete to have the place to himself. In style, they are intended as a homage to those taken by Eugene Atget a century ago in the Parc de Saint-Cloud outside Paris.