Duckett’s Grove – Garden Tour

Duckett’s Grove – Garden Tour

Join Shirley Shirley Lanigan, the noted Irish author as she talks about the changing world of open Irish gardens, with reference to the growth of interest in tings organic and responsible, and will take parts of the garden as illustration.

If you are passionate about growing plants you cannot miss this wonderful tour where visitors will be amazed by the riot of colours in the borders.

Once a grand mansion, Duckett’s Grove is now one of the most photographed ruins in the country. In recent years, the adjoining walled gardens have undergone an exciting restoration. The Upper Walled Garden, hedged with boxwood, is planted with historical varieties of shrub roses, a great range of hardy and tender perennials and choice flowering shrubs. The Lower Walled Garden, once the site of the old orchard, contains a wide variety of fruits, including figs, a mulberry, red currants, blackcurrants, pears, plums and Irish historical varieties of apples. Restored paths and the repaired sunken bridge plus plantings of oak, lime, hazel, spindle and laurel rekindle the spirit of the Georgian pleasure grounds.

Biography

Shirley Lanigan has been writing about Irish gardens for two decades in books and magazines, continuously criss-crossing the island, visiting and re-visiting every large and small, old and new, public and private garden she can find. She lives and loves Irish gardens. Travelling like this puts her in the enviable position of constantly meeting with, and learning from, hundreds of enthusiastic amateur gardeners and growers, as well as with professionals and experts of long standing and international renown.

After twenty years of enjoyable nosing about, she has become more and more interested in how our gardens are evolving in the face of a fast changing and worrying world. Shirley is a regular columnist with the Irish Garden magazine and has published a number of books on Irish gardens: The O’Brien Guide to Irish Gardens (2001), The 100 Best Gardens in Ireland (2011) and The Open Gardens of Ireland (2017). With a background in art, she has a keen interest in the use of art in gardens and believes that gardens made by artists are particularly fascinating. The artist’s eye adds an extra, magical and often indefinable dimension to a garden, making them the most rewarding places to visit and explore.