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00:00Ireland's country house gardens are among our less well known and sometimes less appreciated assets.
00:07In many respects the course of their development reflects the course of Ireland's history.
00:12As the country evolved, so too did her gardens.
00:16And their legacy influences us all.
00:20No matter how small that plot of land you may own, the plants you choose and the way you arrange them
00:25will reflect our historic gardens' influence.
00:29This is the story of the Irish Country House Garden
00:33and of the Irish men and women responsible for their creation.
00:59The Irish Country House Garden
01:05MUSIC PLAYS
01:30When we look at Ireland across the millennia,
01:33the gardens here are a relatively recent phenomenon.
01:36Until the 16th century,
01:38it's thought at least 80% of the country
01:40was covered in woodland and bog.
01:43There were just occasional clearances made
01:45for keeping livestock and growing essential crops such as corn.
01:50So, for hundreds and hundreds of years,
01:52gardens as we understand them really didn't exist in Ireland.
01:56The nearest approximation to what we would consider a garden
01:59was attached to places such as this,
02:01Muckras Abbey in County Kerry.
02:04The monks and nuns would have cultivated fruits and vegetables
02:08for their own consumption,
02:09and they would also have grown a certain number of plants and herbs,
02:12believed to possess medicinal qualities.
02:15In the 16th century, on the instructions of the British Crown,
02:19all such establishments were closed down.
02:22However, around the same time,
02:24gardens attached to domestic residences began to appear.
02:28And our story begins at Lismore Castle in County Waterford.
02:36Darren, we're in the upper garden at Lismore Castle now,
02:39and the essential structure here was laid out in the early 17th century
02:43when Richard Boyle acquired the estate.
02:46So, you're working within that form that you were given, in effect.
02:52Yes, yeah. I mean, basically, as it stands now,
02:56you've got the structure of the gardens held mostly by yew and beach hedges,
03:00and then off the main avenue that runs down the whole of the upper garden here,
03:04you've got these garden rooms that were put over to production.
03:07And things like the yew, obviously, would have been used way back then,
03:10three, four hundred years ago.
03:12They're very much a traditional form for breaking up spaces.
03:15Very much so.
03:16It is one of the best hedges that we can possibly use in a garden setting
03:18just because of the way that we can manage it.
03:20If they get too big and sprawly, they can be cut back hard.
03:23Right.
03:24So, it tends to be the... and evergreen, obviously.
03:26So, it tends to be the go-to plant for hedging.
03:29Obviously, the beach hedging that is around.
03:31It's a more recent addition. Yeah.
03:33You've been here seven years.
03:34Effectively, you had a skeleton, a bone,
03:36and your flesh that you put on it in a botanical fashion.
03:41What have you been adding to the whole place?
03:43Well, because, especially here in the upper garden,
03:46it was all about production.
03:48So, we're trying to keep the story of that going.
03:51We use a lot of the produce in the castle kitchen.
03:54Yeah.
03:55We run a veg box scheme and things like that.
03:57So, the production is such an important element of the garden here
04:00from a historic point of view,
04:01but also how we want to take the garden forward.
04:04The way in which the garden is kind of managed
04:07is a lot more relaxed now than it would have been back in the day.
04:10You know, it would have been a lot more formal
04:12and everything just so and neat rows.
04:15Whereas now, we're, you know, with Lord and Lady Burlington,
04:18wanting a far more sort of romanticised, relaxed style.
04:21Yeah.
04:22So, with new plantings that we do,
04:24we use a lot of self-sewers and annuals and biennials
04:28that are allowed to travel around the garden and sort of tie it in.
04:31So, in the borders around us, you can see the fennel
04:34that runs all the way through.
04:35Yeah.
04:36Well, that's a main plant here in the upper garden.
04:38I mean, it's pretty much in every bed,
04:40every ornamental bed that we have.
04:42So, although they're ornamental beds primarily,
04:46there's a lot of edibles that are in that,
04:48whether that be fennel or we use fruit apple trees that are trained
04:51and pears and things like that as well.
04:53And lots of other different herbs, marjoram and the like.
04:57The way you have the gardens today,
04:59which is mixing the decorative with the functional,
05:02mixing flowers with edibles,
05:04that's very much back in the way it would have been in the 17th century.
05:07Very much so.
05:09The only thing I would add to that,
05:11that we're a lot more relaxed about it.
05:13So, we allow a lot more self-sewers into the past and things like that.
05:16We allow things to spill over the edges of the borders.
05:19So, it's a lot more romanticised vision,
05:21although it's a similar way in which we're combining the plants that we have.
05:25Yeah. Now, what have we got growing on either side of us here, for example?
05:28So, over on the left-hand side here,
05:30this is our main production area,
05:32which is very much a traditional production area.
05:34Rows and rows of vegetables,
05:36and at the moment there's loads of squashes and pumpkins
05:39and sweet corn and beans and the like.
05:41On the right-hand side,
05:42we've got a fruit cage just tucked in behind the yew hedge there,
05:45which is full of tayberries and raspberries, blueberries,
05:48all the soft fruits.
05:50Red currants, black currants, and strawberries.
05:52So, that's in a netted cage.
05:53And then, around that, we've got various raised beds
05:57where we try and play around with the microclimates in the wall garden here.
06:01So, certain vegetables that have kind of become trendy in kitchens now,
06:05recently introduced a lot of the sort of andine tubers that are used,
06:09like ochre and machua and chacha and things like that, yacon.
06:14So, we're growing a lot of those as well.
06:16So, it's great.
06:17So, when we do the veg boxes or supply into the kitchen now,
06:19there's a whole list of...
06:21And those sort of vegetables grow here,
06:23a new problem because it's a microclimate.
06:25Yeah, they're enjoying the benefit of growing in a wall garden.
06:30And the high yew hedges, again, providing...
06:32It all helps in the shelter that we have from that.
06:34It depends how the Irish summer bears out.
06:36I mean, sometimes we have better yields depending on how the summer plays.
06:41I've mentioned that we're in the upper garden,
06:43but there is a second part to the Lismore Castle Garden,
06:46which is the lower garden,
06:48and it has its own very distinctive features.
06:52It's quite different in character to here, isn't that right?
06:54Completely.
06:55It's a lot more relaxed.
06:58It's built around a sort of William Robinson concept.
07:00There's a huge collection of trees and shrubs,
07:03a wonderful magnolia collection and rhododendrons.
07:05So, it's predominantly a spring garden
07:07with little paths that meander through
07:09under the canopy of the woodland there.
07:11And it's kind of all centred around a main ancient yew avenue,
07:15which obviously predates the garden itself.
07:17And then, when Paxton was the head gardener for the sixth duke,
07:20he came over and laid out the form for the lower garden.
07:23And the yew walk is associated, I think, with Edmund Spencer.
07:27Is that the legend?
07:29That's the legend.
07:30I mean, it was talked about,
07:31that's the place where he sat when he penned the fairy queen.
07:35So, what age it is, we're left guessing.
07:38I mean, I think the idea is that the yew walk goes back
07:41to the Middle Ages when this was a bishop's palace.
07:44It may very well be the oldest yew walk in Ireland.
07:49In the years after the Battle of Kinsale in 1601
07:52and the subsequent flight of the earls,
07:54peace began to descend across Ireland.
07:57And as a result, more new gardens,
08:00often the first of their kind in the area,
08:02began to be established.
08:07In 1603, Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clan Rickard,
08:11married Englishwoman Frances Walsingham.
08:14She'd had two previous husbands,
08:16the poet-soldier Sir Philip Sidney
08:18and Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex.
08:21Because of her connections with the English court,
08:24the couple spent a lot of time in that country,
08:26where they built themselves a fine mansion at Summerton in Kent.
08:30But in 1618, they embarked on the construction of a house for themselves
08:34here at Portumna in County Galway.
08:40Located by a crucial crossing point on the River Shannon,
08:43Portumna Castle became the main residence of the Burks
08:46for the next 200 years, until gutted by fire in 1826.
08:54For a long time, it remained a ruin.
08:56But beginning in the late 1960s,
08:58the Office of Public Works undertook a programme of restoration
09:01that continues to the present day.
09:03Portumna Castle isn't actually a castle.
09:12It's what's known as a semi-fortified house.
09:15But because in the 17th century the country was still rather disturbed,
09:19this building does have defensive features,
09:22such as the corner towers on each side of the inner courtyard.
09:26When Portumna Castle was being restored over several decades,
09:31I know also the gardens that we have in front of us here now
09:34were also restored at the same time.
09:36They are, though, very much in the style of a 17th century garden.
09:40Yes, they are. And you can see the geometric shape.
09:43It's very clear, it's very lined out,
09:44and it's important to have the sign of man
09:47and the scissors on every plant they grew at the time.
09:49And this would have been designed to have been seen
09:51from upstairs windows in the castle.
09:52It was designed to be viewed from above and to be absolutely spot-on.
09:55We had box hedging here, which would have been in keeping with the time.
09:58But, unfortunately, the box got box blight,
10:00so we've replaced it.
10:02We've had to replace it with lavender.
10:03We've gone for something completely different
10:05because it can be hard to replace a historically accurate plant
10:08with something that isn't the original and doesn't do the function.
10:11And inside are the roses, and these are old roses.
10:13They're from the 17th century.
10:15There's some lovely old Gallicas, Versicolours in here.
10:18There's some beautiful old roses,
10:19and they flower for three weeks in summer,
10:21and the scent is trapped within the walls
10:23if you get a nice sunny day. It's lovely.
10:25We have the bay balls, and then there would have been
10:27maybe a water feature in the centre, which is missing.
10:30But basically, yes, this is what the garden would have generally looked like.
10:34One of the functions of a garden like this
10:36was to display the owner's affluence.
10:39So having features like water in it,
10:41which would cost money to bring in and to maintain and so forth.
10:44And similarly, the plants were all very much designed to show wealth.
10:48Yes. So for a start, you didn't have herbicides.
10:51So your gravel was weeded by staff with pointed leather gloves
10:55going around on their hands and knees.
10:57Your grass was clipped by hand shears,
10:59and your box hedging was clipped by hand shears.
11:02So this was high maintenance.
11:04It might look plain to us now, but at the time,
11:06this was really high maintenance.
11:08This was bling. This is I have money.
11:10But at the same time, given the turbulent period
11:13in which it was built, this would have been also an oasis of peace,
11:17somewhere that you could find calm and tranquillity given the circumstances.
11:22Oh, absolutely.
11:23And the planting would have been very stable all year round.
11:25The grass didn't change, the box hedging didn't change,
11:27the bay balls wouldn't have changed.
11:29So this would have been a calm garden that stayed the same
11:32throughout the seasons.
11:33And one could have walked these paths and read a book
11:36or chatted with the other ladies of the house
11:38and felt safe within the walls and safe within this garden, yes.
11:42One of the things I noticed, by the way,
11:43are some bees coming in and out of musket holes.
11:46Now, musket holes would have originally been used to train guns out
11:49if the house was under attack.
11:51But it looks to me like some bees have taken up residence in them.
11:54Yeah, we have the native Irish honeybee here on site.
11:56They're here decades and they have a few different hives here,
11:59naturally in the walls.
12:01We've had the University in Galway come out and do some DNA sampling
12:03and they are the native Irish honeybee,
12:05which is the black honeybee that the Clon Rickards would have had
12:07when they were here.
12:09So we have plenty of excitement in summer when they swarm,
12:11but we share the garden with them and I would choose plants
12:14with the bees in mind all the time,
12:16which is part of the reason why the lavender went in
12:18when we had to find a box replacement.
12:20The 17th century was an age of intense scientific investigation
12:27and discovery.
12:29And botany was among the subjects particularly studied,
12:32not least because plants were used in medicine
12:35for their potential healing properties.
12:37And, as Europeans explored new parts of the world,
12:41new plants were brought back home
12:43and the particular properties of these also needed to be examined.
12:53Here in the National Botanic Gardens, Robert,
12:55this is one of our absolute treasures.
12:57We acquired this in 1958 during a major sale of Moor Abbey
13:02and it is extraordinary because it is a collection of pressed dried plants
13:07from the Leiden Botanic Gardens assembled in 1661.
13:11It is the oldest herbarium material we have here.
13:15And what is more, it was once owned by Thomas Molyneux.
13:19Now, Thomas Molyneux was to become the state physician in Ireland,
13:23but during this period when he purchased
13:25this dried collection of plants in Leiden,
13:28he was undertaking essentially a PhD.
13:31He was learning the art of the physician.
13:33And in those days, one regularly visited physic gardens,
13:38botanical gardens, where plants were often assembled
13:41because of their medicinal virtues.
13:44So this would have been an important primer, if you like,
13:47of all of the plants growing in the Leiden Botanic Gardens
13:50and he would have gathered notes
13:52on the medicinal properties of each plant.
13:55He came from a place called Castle Dillon, a country house estate,
13:58and he was one of a number.
14:00He wasn't acting alone.
14:01He was very much part of a group of such house owners of the time.
14:05Yes, it was a period again of great discoveries and knowledge.
14:10So even attending a university like Leiden at the time
14:13was an extraordinary step forwards
14:16in sort of academic improvements for Ireland.
14:20And when he came back to Ireland, it was a hotbed, if you like,
14:24of botanists, naturalists,
14:26all of whom had great interests in new learnings.
14:29And what is extraordinary about this book
14:31is that Thomas Molyneux has carefully written at the front
14:34precisely who he bought the book from.
14:37So there is Mr. Chaimans, who was a pharmacist in Leiden.
14:41He purchased it in 1661 while he was there.
14:44But here underneath is another annotation added by Thomas Molyneux again in 1693,
14:50so the closing years of the 17th century,
14:53when he is explaining that William Sherrard went through the book
14:58and has re-annotated it.
15:00So Chaimans did not originally name some of these plants,
15:04but William Sherrard, one of the leading botanists of his time,
15:07was in Dublin.
15:09And interestingly, we know he had been the tutor
15:12to Sir Arthur Rawdon's children up in Moira.
15:15He had not only cut his teeth there
15:17on all the Jamaican tropical plants being grown in the hothouses there,
15:22but he was also down in Dublin,
15:24assisting people like Thomas Molyneux
15:26to put the correct names onto these plants.
15:29In that respect, there is a direct link
15:31between this sort of study
15:33and country house gardens of the late 17th, early 18th century.
15:37Clearly, people like William Sherrard
15:39would have visited other people around the country,
15:41advised about plant names,
15:43and in that sense generated an appetite for exotic plants,
15:48building plant collections.
15:50One such place where a plant collection was created
15:54in the 17th century can still be found not far from Dublin.
15:59Kilradarie County Wicklow has been home to the Brabazon family,
16:05Earls of Meath, for over 400 years.
16:08The house and gardens are particularly important
16:10because of a style that was introduced here in the 17th century.
16:14And it's the finest surviving example
16:16of that kind of decorative garden,
16:18not just in Ireland, but throughout these islands.
16:21We're going to look at three particular features here,
16:23beginning with one up to the left behind the main house.
16:35We are currently walking between two very long stretches of water,
16:40and these are very typical features of a 17th century garden.
16:43Oh, absolutely. These sheets of water were known as the long ponds.
16:48Right.
16:49And they were fish ponds.
16:50They were useful for entertaining.
16:53They were a source of delight, certainly,
16:55and they were very ornamental.
16:57But at their core, they were fundamentally to feed the house.
17:00So they would have been stocked with fresh water fish like carp,
17:03tench, roach, a lot of things we wouldn't eat now.
17:05Probably sound disgusting.
17:06But they were used for fishing.
17:08So they would have big nets, and they'd have been kept,
17:10and people would have come out and collected fish
17:12to bring into the kitchens for eating.
17:14But they were also used for taking little boats on.
17:18And as in Versailles, where you see lots and lots of ponds,
17:21there would be, you know, mock battles and things would take place,
17:25and people would have little boats and, you know,
17:27maybe perhaps dining out at the side of the ponds.
17:30Also, the dappled light from the ponds would create a lovely atmosphere,
17:34especially in the evenings.
17:36And you also get a bit of a cooling breeze from water as well,
17:39which is also lovely when the weather was hot.
17:43And there's quite a lot of engineering involved in creating these
17:45because these are entirely artificial.
17:47Yeah, absolutely.
17:49If you think, again, of somewhere like Versailles,
17:51which is the big famous 17th-century garden,
17:54that had a very high water table,
17:56so it was relatively easy to create ponds.
17:58But often in places like this or Brecktonston
18:00or other 17th-century gardens,
18:02a huge amount of engineering had to go in.
18:04So they would find springs or wells or another water source,
18:07and there would be a series of pumps and sluices
18:10and pipes around the garden to fill the ponds
18:15if the water level became low,
18:17or to feed the fountains, etc.
18:20And the ponds, the pipes were made of alder, generally.
18:23Alder? A wood?
18:24Yeah, alder wood, yeah.
18:25So the point about these were they were decorative,
18:27but they also were very functional.
18:29Very functional.
18:30The whole thing about the 17th-century garden,
18:33and especially in Ireland,
18:34was they really adhered to sort of Virgil's concept
18:38of Utile e Dulce, which is like beauty and utility.
18:42Right.
18:43So they would look lovely,
18:44but they also had this sort of secondary useful purpose.
18:48Another feature, which is actually very important
18:50in the 17th-century garden,
18:52was that they were all based around geometry and axial symmetry.
18:56So this here, looking straight up,
18:58you see this big avenue,
19:00which is running out to views of the mountains beyond,
19:03which unfortunately you can't see today.
19:05And there was a double row of lime trees.
19:08Lime was a very common avenue tree along with elm.
19:11And this central axis was the main spine of the garden,
19:15and all the other features came off it.
19:17So you have the canals and the angles and the wilderness,
19:19and it would run straight through the house
19:21and it would continue the other side.
19:23The avenue would actually go through the other side.
19:25Down to a gate?
19:26Down to a gate.
19:27And, of course, the house actually went right across at one stage.
19:30Part of the house is now missing.
19:32So this was all very much symmetrically placed
19:35to be sort of geometrically perfect.
19:37And all the other features radiate from this central axis.
19:40We've left the canals, which are now directly behind us,
19:53and we've come into an adjacent part of the 17th century garden,
19:57which is, as we can see around shortly,
20:00very appropriately called the angles.
20:02And again, this is a very typical feature
20:04of a baroque garden at the time?
20:06Absolutely, yes.
20:08Again, it's that very strict geometry,
20:11akin to a labyrinth or a maze,
20:13in that it's laid out in a series of little passages
20:16and rooms you have come into.
20:18It's a series of separate gardens, which are known as Cabernets,
20:21and in the centre of each you might have a feature,
20:23maybe a pond or a piece of statuary.
20:26But you'd have these little enclosed spaces,
20:28and then, again, lots of little radial axis coming in and out.
20:32And they would be made of evergreen or semi-evergreens,
20:36such as yew, hornbeam, beech, you know,
20:39trees that would keep a sort of sense of shelter and enclosure.
20:45And privacy.
20:46And privacy, yeah.
20:47If you lived in the 17th century,
20:49you got very little privacy in any of these big houses.
20:51You had staff all the time, family, children,
20:54other people living around the house.
20:55So it was a nice place where people could come
20:57and have a bit of quiet.
20:59They're very high maintenance,
21:01and there must have been a lot of gardeners employed,
21:03particularly at a time when you didn't have things like strimmers
21:06making the job easier.
21:08Absolutely extraordinary.
21:10Fortunately for Irish landlords, labour was much cheaper
21:13than it was in Britain.
21:14But they would have, you know, you would have a head gardener
21:17and then a sort of second head gardener,
21:19and then you'd have lots and lots of jobbing gardeners
21:21and day gardens who would come in.
21:22A lot of women would be employed in gardens
21:24to do weeding and things.
21:25Really?
21:26But everything would have had been done by hand.
21:28Sides and shears, and it would have taken,
21:30I imagine even today with strimmers and electric things,
21:34it would take, by the time you'd finished,
21:37you'd be back to the start again, really.
21:39But these were all done by hand.
21:40Yeah.
21:41And some of the hedges would have been absolutely enormous.
21:43There are pictures of hedges, you know, sort of 17, 20 feet high
21:46that people would have to get up on ladders and cut.
21:50Kilruddery is a unique surviving example
21:53of a style of garden that could once be found
21:55right around the country.
21:57The relatively peaceful conditions
21:59of the late 17th and early 18th centuries in Ireland
22:02allowed estate owners to develop their domains
22:04in the then prevailing fashion.
22:07France was very influential in garden design
22:10in the 17th century.
22:12Yes, very, very much so.
22:14The sort of leader of the pack again
22:17was Louis in Versailles.
22:19And people emulated him.
22:21And you have to remember that during the period
22:25of Britain being a de facto republic
22:27when Cromwell was here,
22:28the royal family spent a lot of time in exile
22:31and they spent time in France.
22:33And, in fact, they were related.
22:35So they would have seen a lot of the gardens in France
22:38and what was going on there.
22:39So very much a French style.
22:41The symmetry, as I said,
22:42the absolutist sort of form of gardening.
22:45Everything very formal, very clipped.
22:47This romped pond here would be very French,
22:50especially with the fountain in the centre.
22:52And the French gardener of the time was André Le Neutre.
22:55Yeah.
22:56So it was his designs at Versailles
22:58that influenced a garden such as this one at Kilruddery.
23:00Yeah.
23:01He was the sort of master planner of all these gardens
23:04because they involved...
23:06The gardens were bigger than some towns.
23:08Absolutely spectacular gardens.
23:10Real show places.
23:11And there were monuments to showing off, really.
23:14What we now call the Baroque garden
23:16can be seen as the horticultural expression
23:18of Western Europe's belief in its ability
23:21to dominate the rest of the world.
23:24As countries outside Europe were being conquered
23:27and forced to obey the will of their new rulers,
23:30plants were also being made to submit to the design of men.
23:38Today the Royal Hospital Kilmainham is in the middle of Dublin.
23:41But when constructed in the late 17th century,
23:44it would have been surrounded by open countryside.
23:47And there's a direct link between here and Kilruddery
23:51because Captain Edward Brabison, 4th Earl of Meath,
23:54was not only responsible for laying out the gardens
23:57at his family's Wicklow estate,
23:59he was also appointed master of the Royal Hospital.
24:03The establishment of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham
24:06was quite an enlightened move for the time
24:08and it was certainly the first such institution established
24:11in these islands.
24:12But it was, on the other hand, in part inspired by a similar place
24:16in Paris, the Envalides, which Louis XIV had built
24:20for his old soldiers.
24:22Yes, Louis built Les Envalides in 1670
24:26and Charles II and his sort of chief advisor,
24:30the Irish Duke of Ormond, James Butler,
24:32had spent part of the exile in France.
24:35And James Butler came back and he was a soldier
24:38and he determined to build his own version here.
24:41And it predates the Royal Hospital in Chelsea by two years.
24:44He got William Robinson to design this.
24:46But he was very enlightened and he was keen not only to provide
24:49the soldiers with a place to live in, but also a place of beauty
24:53and gardens where they could exercise and walk and take the air
24:56and be fed properly and nurtured properly, having fought in all these battles.
25:01What distinguishes this garden is that it has many of the features
25:05of a country house garden.
25:06Oh, it does, exactly.
25:07Because it was meant to house these old soldiers.
25:09There weren't, a lot of them weren't old at all,
25:11but they'd been in battles or whatever.
25:13And they were to have all the pleasures and enjoyment of a country house garden.
25:17And you have to remember that when this was built,
25:19this was much more rural than it is today.
25:21And they had the Phoenix Park just across the way, the Royal Park.
25:24So we have these very straight lines meeting at certain key points,
25:28all these very clipped yews.
25:30It's very similar to how the angles in Kilrudderie would have been.
25:35And, you know, I think they possibly the formal areas in Kilrudderie,
25:38as I said, would have had gravel walks.
25:40And you can see the gravel here between the walks and the formal areas.
25:43And there's lots of use of box and yew and beautiful topiary,
25:47which was a huge 17th century fashion statement.
25:51And these pleached limes, these long walks of pleached limes.
25:53Yes, this used to be called a hedge on stilts.
25:56So you'd have the thin trunks and then the limes or hornbeam
26:00or any other tree, similar tree that was suitable for it,
26:03the branches would be intertwined.
26:05And that was called pleaching.
26:07And this would create this hedge effect.
26:09This solid hedge.
26:10Solid.
26:11But as you say, on stilts, so raised up.
26:12Yes, yes.
26:13So you could see below them all.
26:14A very similar technique to hedge laying, except raised.
26:16And the pond, I think, was used for fish?
26:18It was.
26:19It was another fish pond, which again would provide fish and food
26:22for the soldiers.
26:23So very typical of a Baroque garden.
26:25It's both decorative and functional.
26:27Yes, very functional.
26:28And all these walls at the edge of the terrace
26:31would have been used to grow wall fruit.
26:33As I said, Edward Brabison specified that fruit
26:35was to be bought for the garden.
26:36And we can see on Charles Brookings map of Dublin,
26:39there's a little side sort of illustration of the Royal Hospital.
26:41And you can see the fruit growing on the walls of this garden.
26:46OK.
26:47But there was a second garden.
26:48I think a physic garden, which no longer exists.
26:50No.
26:51That was down beside the infirmary, which was actually beside
26:54Dr. Stevens Hospital, which is another early building.
26:57And that was the actual physic garden where the plants that were
27:01to provide medicine for the soldiers were grown.
27:04Now, physic gardens and kitchen gardens were sort of interchangeable
27:07during the period because as we discussed previously,
27:10food had to be grown to provide food in the days before fridges
27:14and supermarkets.
27:15But also the kitchen garden was full of physic plants
27:17because there was no medicine.
27:19As we would know it today, you couldn't run down to the chemist's shop.
27:22So plants would have been grown to help, like feverfew has its name
27:27because the soldier had a fever, you could make a tea out of the feverfew.
27:30Self-heal.
27:31All these plants would have been grown in the garden to provide medicines.
27:34And there are records when Dr. Dunn was working in the hospital,
27:38of the Royal Hospital, where they discuss the plants that had,
27:41the medicinal plants that had to be grown to look after the soldiers.
27:48All gardens represent a struggle for dominance between man and nature.
27:52And the Baroque style offers a particularly explicit demonstration
27:56of that struggle, with man apparently emerging as the victor.
28:04As we've seen, the Baroque garden always exhibits a certain rigid formality.
28:10But by the middle of the 18th century, a change of attitude had emerged,
28:14a greater appreciation of nature and her inherent qualities.
28:18And yet, strangely enough, the source of that change wasn't nature but painting.
28:26Finola, it's a curious phenomenon that the development of gardens,
28:31country house gardens, really arises from art.
28:35And in particular, strangely enough, a series of French painters working in Italy.
28:41Yes, well, you're speaking of Claude Lorraine, who in the 17th century produced all these classical views,
28:48of particularly the mythologies, the great classical mythologies.
28:52And these were greatly appreciated, particularly by men on the Grand Tour,
28:56who would purchase them as they did the circuit.
28:59And then they were brought back to England and Ireland.
29:01And there were also many wars and political occurrences during that period as well.
29:06So at those times, it was difficult for people to go on the Grand Tour.
29:10And I think when they looked at their, you know, Claude Lorraine on the wall,
29:13they then also started to look out the window and go,
29:16like, how could we have our own Claude Lorraine in Ireland or in England?
29:20And how can we make the landscape outside the window start to look
29:24like these idealised images of ideal landscapes on the inside?
29:28Yes, because Claude Lorraine and others were producing these wonderful Arcadian-like views
29:33of the countryside, which to some extent, of course, were also imaginary,
29:38like the myths that they were showing.
29:40But as a result of that, you start to get Irish people producing images,
29:44particularly around here.
29:46You have, for example, Mrs. Delaney coming here in 1767,
29:49or at least producing drawings in 1767.
29:53Yes, and what's interesting about Delaney is that she also structures them into a circuit
29:57or a tour.
29:58So she starts to identify the best prospects in Killarney.
30:02And then when someone like Jonathan Fisher comes a bit later in the 1770s,
30:06he then starts doing more formal oils.
30:09And he also, very interestingly, does a plan of Killarney, of the lower lake,
30:14and picks out the best stations to view his prospects from.
30:19And then eventually he turns his oils into a series of prints and publishes them as a book.
30:24And that's what really makes Killarney the apex of the picturesque throughout Europe.
30:30Also with William Gilpin, who was the leading theorist,
30:33who basically says that Killarney is the leading picturesque landscape in Europe.
30:38So that advances. Fisher and Gilpin together advance the position of Killarney.
30:43But once he's identified the points on the plan,
30:47and then created all those scenes,
30:50then tourists come and they start to obsessively follow the circuit,
30:54and to want to see exactly what they've seen in books before they've arrived.
30:59And it also then affects the real landscapes,
31:02and not only the images that people see,
31:04because people start to want to make the images in real life as such.
31:08In effect, what they want to do is to have their own Killarney at home, so to speak.
31:12And that obviously then has an impact on country house gardens and landscaping around the house.
31:18Exactly. They start to create kind of miniature idealised views
31:22within whatever scale of landscape that they own.
31:25So, of course, it varies from a state to a state.
31:29Sometimes you can replicate aspects of Killarney very much in the right scale,
31:34but other times you might just introduce kind of a shorthand for a picturesque image.
31:40You might just have, you know, a small water feature, a bridge,
31:44that kind of depth of field that Fisher gets in that great view,
31:47which is the north view of Killarney, where he gets that open, he calls it,
31:51between the lower lake up to the middle lake.
31:54And you also get that trajectory from the beautiful to the sublime.
31:58So everyone tries to do this in miniature in their own gardens
32:02to get that depth and compression of meaning that a great painting has.
32:09The man best known for transforming the ideal Arcadian landscape into reality
32:14was English gardener Lancelot Capability Brown.
32:21He never came to Ireland despite being offered the enormous sum of £1,000 by the Duke of Leinster.
32:27Brown turned down the offer, saying that he had not finished England yet.
32:32Nevertheless, his influence was widely felt in this country.
32:36For Capability Brown and his followers, only three elements were essential
32:42for the creation of the perfect Arcadian landscape, namely trees, water and grass.
32:49All these elements can be found at Ballyfin in County Leash.
32:58It looks entirely natural, but in fact this is an elaborate man-made construction.
33:04Covering almost 30 acres, the Serpentine Lake appears to have always been here.
33:10Actually, it was only created in the mid-18th century.
33:14The water brought from the Sleeve Bloom Mountains some miles away
33:17via a series of specially installed stone-lined channels.
33:22In the classical Baroque garden, fruit and vegetables were grown in close proximity to the main house,
33:40along with plants grown for their supposed medicinal qualities,
33:44and plants grown just because, well, because they were beautiful.
33:47All of them would be mixed together, sometimes in the same beds.
33:51But with the advent of the romantic landscape park, all of that had to be swept away,
33:56and an alternative location found where fruit and vegetables
33:59and other provisions could be grown.
34:01That alternative place was the walled garden.
34:06Walled gardens typically run to four acres.
34:09The one here at Ballyfin actually covers seven acres,
34:12and it's split into an upper and lower section.
34:16The walls around the perimeter served two purposes.
34:20They offered shelter from the elements for more delicate plants,
34:24and they kept out intruders, both animal and human.
34:31The typical walled garden is divided into a number of different areas,
34:34some of which are used to grow vegetables, while others are used to bring on various fruits.
34:40Part of the walled garden here is devoted to an orchard filled with the likes of apple and pear trees.
34:49Another important feature of the walled garden was the greenhouse,
34:52usually erected against a south-facing wall lined in brick.
34:56As well as a number of greenhouses in its walled garden,
34:59Ballyfin also has a mid-19th century conservatory,
35:03which is attached to the house.
35:08It was designed by Richard Turner,
35:10who was also responsible for creating the great greenhouses
35:13at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin.
35:16Matthew, we know that greenhouses have existed in Ireland for a long time,
35:24because Arthur Rawdon, at his now Lost Garden in Moira,
35:28had a very early example of them.
35:30But they really come into their own from the early 19th century onwards.
35:34A combination of several factors that led to the cheapness of glass being one of them,
35:39the opportunity to build the large houses.
35:42And here at Glasnevin we, you know,
35:45proudly have one of the finest pieces of Irish architecture
35:48in the form of Richard Turner's curvilinear house.
35:51It's an extraordinary building,
35:53fully restored by the Office of Public Works in 1995,
35:57at a time when perhaps people didn't recognise the importance and value of items like that.
36:03So, you know, it's a great tribute that, you know,
36:05the Irish state decided that it would fully restore.
36:09And when I say fully restored, you know,
36:11it is an exact representation of the original building,
36:15using all the old iron and so on.
36:17And Richard Turner was born, as I recall, in Dublin,
36:20and had his iron foundry here.
36:22What he did was make it possible to build much larger greenhouses
36:27than had hitherto been possible.
36:29One of his great innovations was steam-driven
36:32hammers that would allow these curved members to be produced.
36:37So these glazing bars that would be several metres in length,
36:40but each one with exactly the same curvature to them,
36:43meant that the house had a beautiful symmetry to it.
36:46And very few others were able to do that.
36:48Cast iron is much clunkier and thicker.
36:51A Turner glass house is like filigree.
36:53And even today, when one looks at them, it's admirable how amazing they look,
36:58how light and airy they appear.
37:00That's the structure.
37:02But also internally, therefore,
37:04they had an enormous effect on what you could and couldn't grow.
37:08Yes, so this led to an era where the exotic plant was one of the great symbols of one's wealth.
37:17And many dealers got into importing rare plants such as orchids.
37:22There were great auctions of these plants, all collected from the wild.
37:26And people competed to buy something exotic and unknown.
37:30John Lyons, out in West Meath,
37:32had established an extraordinary collection of orchids.
37:35And it was Frederick Moore, here at Glasnevin,
37:37who in the latter two decades of the 19th century,
37:40built the largest collection of tropical orchids known.
37:44So to have assembled such a vast collection was a great tribute,
37:48because he was not well-funded running the National Botanic Gardens of the time.
37:52And he used to do deals with the auctioneers and buy up all of the stock
37:57that was left over at the end of a sale.
37:59Small plants often missing their flowers.
38:01And many of them turned out to be new species to science.
38:05Another role that these greenhouses had in country houses was to grow exotic fruits
38:10that wouldn't have survived in the outdoors.
38:13Yes, so these ranges really appeared, not a Turner range,
38:17which was usually displayed in a more prominent spot,
38:20but in walled gardens and so forth there were always glass houses,
38:24often heated with chimneys and young men
38:27who would keep the fires going all through the night to avoid frost,
38:32and develop remarkable collections.
38:34And they were something that these house owners
38:36would proudly show to their visitors.
38:39Absolutely, because, you know, you would be taken around
38:42to see that there were bananas or pineapples being grown on the estate,
38:47that you would then consume at the table in the house.
38:50And one of the great links there was, you know, visiting these houses.
38:54Sir Frederick Moore, as director of the National Botanic Gardens,
38:59was a regular friend of many of these big house owners.
39:02Not all hot houses, greenhouses, were strictly functional.
39:06Some of them actually had a more, say, decorative purpose,
39:09and they would often be attached to houses as a place
39:13where hosts could entertain their guests.
39:15A very good example of that would be Ballyfin,
39:17where Turner has very successfully set a glass house aside from the house
39:22with a connecting tunnel.
39:24And indeed it would have been an extraordinary place to visit,
39:27a winter garden, but plants that could never survive out of doors,
39:32and each one sort of unique and rare
39:35and a great opportunity to show off to your lunch guests.
39:39Greenhouses and conservatories were by no means
39:42the only buildings found within country house gardens.
39:46From the 17th century onwards,
39:48other structures were installed around the site.
39:51Some might serve as a tea house
39:53or a pavilion in which to shelter from the elements.
39:56Others, popularly known as follies,
39:59would have no purpose except to provide visual interest
40:02in the landscape, to close a vista, for example,
40:06or break up what might otherwise be a monotonous view.
40:10The most famous surviving example
40:12of a country house garden building
40:14is the casino at Merino, now a suburb of Dublin,
40:18which was built in the second half of the 18th century
40:21for the first Earl of Charlemagne.
40:24We know James Caulfield, the Earl of Charlemagne,
40:27as a great patriot and a great patron of the arts
40:30in 18th century Ireland, but Rosemary,
40:32we don't really think of him in association with gardens
40:34until we come here to Merino outside Dublin
40:38and see this building, the casino.
40:40Yes, and it's an extraordinary example
40:42of neoclassical architecture.
40:44James Caulfield was extremely well-read.
40:47He was a great scholar, but he also was extremely well-travelled,
40:50and he would have done the grand tour in the mid-18th century,
40:53had a great interest in the Greek and Roman classics,
40:56and with his estate here at Merino he wanted to recreate elements
40:59that he would have experienced on the grand tour
41:01and designed those into the landscape here.
41:03He worked with Sir William Chambers, his architect,
41:07and he commissioned the design of the casino,
41:09and they started to build it in 1759.
41:12Casino doesn't mean that Lord Charlemagne was running
41:15a gambling den here in the 18th century.
41:18It means something else quite different.
41:20He spent a lot of time in Italy when he was on the grand tour,
41:23and in particular in Rome, that's where he met William Chambers.
41:26And casino, casa, means house in Italian,
41:29and then ino at the end of it, any Italian word, means little.
41:32So casino means little house, and this was a summer house,
41:35a place to socialise, to culturally expand the mind,
41:38to take a break from the travails of city life and the main house.
41:42It looks from the exterior as though it would just be one room,
41:45but it is, as you say, it's a complete house, it has many rooms.
41:48And that's what's extraordinary about it,
41:50and that's why it's so significant from an architectural point of view.
41:52There are 16 rooms over three floors,
41:54really extraordinary amount of architectural detail,
41:57and it is one of the finest examples of neoclassical architecture in Europe.
42:01What's also interesting is that the significance of this building
42:04was recognised right from the very start.
42:07There are very early paintings of it.
42:09It was then engraved, it was written about,
42:12and that continues all the way up to the last century
42:15when the Irish state itself recognised the significance of the casino.
42:20Yes, and TJ Byrne, who was the principal architect for the Office of Public Works in 1930,
42:25convinced the government that they should amend the National Monuments Act
42:28to include post-medieval buildings.
42:30And so the casino became the first property of post-1700s
42:34to be covered by the new National Monuments provisions at the time.
42:38It was really important because it meant that the state had a duty of care
42:41to look after the casino for future generations.
42:43So over the decades, OPW has invested in the property, conserved it, refurbished it.
42:47There was a major refurbishment in the 1980s,
42:49and works continue right up to this day.
42:51But it's part of a wider portfolio, obviously,
42:53that the Office of Public Works cares for.
42:55We look after about 800 national monuments nationwide,
42:58and then there are 31 very important historic properties,
43:02including castles, houses, gardens, designed landscapes,
43:05important plant collections.
43:07And I think that whole portfolio,
43:09you can really trace the history of the Irish Country Garden
43:12through that portfolio.
43:14And you'll find really fine examples from different periods.
43:17So if you think of the formal gardens of Royal Hospital Calmainham,
43:20or at Port Dominic Castle, for instance,
43:22and then maybe the capability brown-style landscapes
43:24that we see at Castletown House,
43:26or at Donnerail in North Cork,
43:29right up to some examples from the 20th century
43:31and the great plant collecting that the Bryce family would have done
43:33at Garnish Island.
43:34So it's a very broad spectrum of gardens and properties.
43:38Right through the portfolio,
43:39you get this tracing of the national patrimony
43:41that people can enjoy today.
43:44Today, the casino stands in isolation.
43:47But at the time of its construction,
43:49it was just one of a number of garden buildings
43:52dotted around the grounds of Lord Charlemagne's estate at Merino.
43:55And these buildings drew their inspiration
43:58from a wide variety of sources.
44:00Not far from the casino, for example,
44:03and in startling contrast to it stood what was known as Rosamund's Bower,
44:09a now lost Gothic folly that looked as though it were part of a medieval cathedral.
44:17One of the peculiarities of late 18th century sensibility
44:20was the freedom people felt to mix different styles,
44:24different periods in the same place.
44:26So here in Hayward, County Leash,
44:29you have a pastoral Arcadian landscape
44:32with a neoclassical villa at its centre.
44:34And yet in close proximity,
44:36the family built a number of extraordinary Gothic ruins,
44:39such as the fake abbey directly behind me.
44:42This didn't exist until it was constructed at the end of the 18th century.
44:46The only real feature about it is a 15th century window
44:51thought to have been brought here from Ahaboe Abbey,
44:54some 12 miles away.
44:55And directly opposite the abbey is a sham castle,
44:59a vast towering structure with four towers,
45:02one at each corner, again completely fake
45:05and installed towards the end of the 18th century.
45:12As we've seen, for country house owners
45:15in the late 18th century,
45:17the seemingly natural pastoral landscape
45:19was the height of fashion.
45:21And all they needed for that
45:22were the three elements of grass, water and trees.
45:26The last of these might look as though they're randomly planted,
45:29but actually they were always very carefully sighted,
45:31usually in groups.
45:32However, by the mid-19th century,
45:34that style had fallen out of fashion
45:36because owners found it too plain.
45:39They were looking for something more elaborate.
45:45Designed by architect James Wyatt in 1770,
45:50Abbey Leakes was built for Thomas Vesey,
45:52first Viscount de Vesey, and his beautiful wife, Selina.
45:56Further work was undertaken on the building
45:58in the mid-19th century for the third Viscount.
46:01And it was around this time that the gardens
46:03were given their present appearance.
46:08From this position, you can really see the difference
46:10between the naturalistic landscape
46:12and the terraces immediately behind me.
46:15These terraces were created in the 1860s
46:18by Lady Emma Herbert,
46:19wife of the third Viscount de Vesey.
46:22It's sometimes thought that Lady Emma,
46:24whose mother was Russian,
46:25had been inspired by similar gardens created in the Crimea
46:29by her uncle, Prince Mikhail Vorontsov,
46:32but this seems fanciful conjecture.
46:34More likely, the scheme was dreamt up by mother and daughter.
46:38Originally, the spaces between the grass verges
46:42were filled with colourful bedding plants
46:44which had to be changed several times a year.
46:47It's a style that you only really find now in municipal parks.
46:51And back in the mid-1990s,
46:52the Abbey Leakes scheme was simplified
46:54by the use of pale-coloured gravel.
47:01Abbey Leakes's terraces are an example
47:03of what would quickly become the latest dominant fashion
47:06for country house gardens throughout Ireland.
47:09And in the next episode,
47:10we'll see further examples of this very formal style
47:14before discovering how,
47:15towards the end of the 19th century,
47:17it too was swept away
47:19in favour of a quite different approach,
47:22one which still resonates in gardens,
47:24large and small, to the present day.
47:27For more information,
47:28visit us at www.fema.org.
47:29For more information,
47:30visit us at www.fema.org.
47:33To be continued...
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