Dublin is not a huge city. It takes no time at all to walk from St. Stephen’s Green to Grafton Street to the River Liffey and O’Connell Street and into the Temple Bar area. Trinity College is close by and St. Patrick’s Church and Christ Church are easy to find.
From our hotel, The Long Hall, one of Dublin’s most famous pubs, is just around the corner on South Great Geroge’s Street. The Hairy Lemon Cafe Bar is also close by on Stephen Street Lower. St. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is a few steps on with the Gaiety Theatre across King Street.
Dublin, of course, is a party town with dozens of pubs offering live music all afternoon and until late at night. Young people in their 20s represent a significant portion of the city’s population, so it is predictable to find Temple Bar and other favourite pub areas bustling with activity, especially on a Friday night.
We came to Dublin to see gardens. We have seen many large, estate gardens. This time, we wanted to see some smaller, more intimate, private gardens.
Mark and Olive Wilkinson welcomed us to their beautiful garden in Tyrrelstown on the outskirts of Dublin.
The Wilkinsons are the definition of graciousness and hospitality and made my group so welcome, it was a challenge to get them to leave.
Highlights of the garden included spectacular examples of crinodendron, Cornus controversa variegata, kalmia, abutilon and dazzling clumps of iris and delphiniums.
In the sunshine, the garden’s water features – a lovely lily-covered pond with waterfalls over dark layered Irish basalt and a charming water basin next to a graceful white metal arching bridge – again captured a lot of attention and prompted the excited snapping of photographs.
Both Mark and Olive have a knack for telling engaging stories and also have a skill for opening minds to new, interesting information.
But it did not hurt, of course, that they tell stories with a lovely lilting, velvety Irish accent that made listening such a pleasure that I found the sound of the words spoken almost hypnotic and so relaxing they induce a relaxing, virtual dream-like feeling.
In addition to the Wilkinsons’ garden, we visited Lambs Cross, the garden of Patricia and Michael Maguire; Knockrose, the garden of Tom and Trish Farrell, and Corke Lodge, the garden of Alfred Cochrane.
Each one was a delight, a joy to walk around. We emerged from each one happy and feeling very privileged to have been treated to such a once in a lifetime encounter.
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