Castlewellan, A Success Story!

I will admit to being "hard to please" when I visit gardens (and restaurants!) and am regularly disppointed and annoyed by people who boast loudly and charge exorbitantly for admission to gardens which hardly merit the time it takes to visit them. But, occasionally, we come to a garden which possesses that quiet confidence which …

The Birds Stole the Show!

There is a great pity about Seaforde Gardens in Co. Down that we nowadays see only the tiniest portion, not historically even a part, of what was a landscape garden on the grand scale. The Forde family have been at Seaforde for 400 years, a demesne of 20,000 acres, which was laid out in the …

Airfield in Photographs

Airfield Estate is the perfect Rus in Urbe, a delightful oasis of peace and beauty in Dundrum, Dublin, and even more so as the city has now engulfed it completely with high-rise buildings and construction cranes on the skyline around it. The estate is a charitable trust, established by sisters Letitia and Naomi Overend in …

Castleward, in View!

At the end of our visit to Castleward, I wondered if the best thing about it was the view onto Strangford Lough; that it was better to look out rather than look too closely at what was withing. Yet, I felt there was here the potential - and the promise of the National Trust - …

Mount Stewart

Mount Stewart is situated on the shore of Strangford Lough, south of Newtownards on the Ards Peninsula and is one of the great gardens of Ireland. The credit for its creation lies with Edith, Lady Londonderry, who came to live at Mount Stewart in 1921, fell in love with the house and area and decided …

Hillsborough Castle Gardens

It may seem a minor observation and a detail hardly worth a comment but what struck me most about the gardens at Hillsborough Castle was that they were open to the public at all. My recollection of our previous visit, when the gardens were generally closed but opened especially for us as we were in …

The Rowallane Blues

Rowallane Gardens in Co. Down were created in the late 19th century by Reverend John Moore and his nephew Hugh Armytage Moore and are now in the care of the National Trust. The Moore's passion for interesting plants is still obvious in the gardens for they are home to a wonderful collection which is guaranteed …

The View from the Lawnmower:

It's a matter of perspective, I suppose, or the slightly elevated viewpoint of a lawnmower seat which facilitates my seeing things in the garden which might at other times escape my notice. Perhaps, it is because the lawnmower brings me right around the garden while, at other times, I may work the entire day on …