A great glasshouse revival

The long-buried Victorian glasshouses and frames in the walled garden at Ashtown Castle in the Phoenix Park are to be restored and put on public view, writes FIONNUALA FALLON

I AGREE THAT, at first glance, it (see below) doesn’t really look like much: just a few mud-encrusted brick foundations, a cracked, puddle-covered tiled path, and a strangely sunken, rectangular chamber retained by fire-blackened walls. But this is in fact a photograph of the recently-unearthed ruins of three of Ashtown walled garden’s Victorian glasshouses and frames as well as its very substantial boiler house, all of which had been concealed beneath a foot of soil and rubble for many decades.

Based on the limited amount of historical documentation available to him, as well as a specially-commissioned archaeological report, the Chief Parks Superintendent of the OPW, Dr John McCullen, thinks that each one of these small glasshouses/frames served a very particular purpose; one being a lean-to melon house/frame, the second being a small, hip-roofed glasshouse used for propagation and the third being what he calls a pit-house. But what’s especially wonderful is the news that their excavation is part of the OPW’s plan to reinstate these structures in Ashtown’s walled kitchen garden in the Phoenix Park – with any luck sometime over the next six months – using vernacular materials (lime, brick, stone) and traditional skills.

“Fingers crossed that the funding comes as planned, but yes, it’s wonderful news,” says Dr McCullen, adding that the addition of the melon frame, the glasshouse and the pit-house will “increase public enthusiasm and expand people’s enjoyment of the garden”. He isn’t, of course, the only one who finds this latest stage of the walled garden’s restoration exciting – along with his colleague Margaret Gormley and many other OPW staff, the Victorian kitchen garden’s two full-time gardeners, Brian Quinn and Meeda Downey, are quietly ecstatic at the news that the next phase of its restoration is now beginning.

And it’s not just the fact that the reinstated houses and frames will allow much of the yearly spring ritual of propagation to take place on site, putting an end to the two gardeners’ time-consuming trips to the OPW Klondyke glasshouses (a mile-long journey away). “It’s just fantastic to see it going ahead,” says Meeda Downey. “It’s another stage, another step, in the process of bringing the garden back to something approaching what it was like in its Victorian heyday.”

“Neither of us had expected that so much of the original buildings would have survived,” adds Brian Quinn, “So it was amazing watching original features like the terracotta tiles of the pit-house being uncovered.”

“Even little things, like the Victorian supplier’s name we found hand-carved on part of an old water tank – J Rock of DN 1835 – all add to the sense of history,” agrees Meeda.

There will be some important differences between Ashtown’s new glasshouse, its melonry and its pit-house and each of their Victorian predecessors – the most significant being that the former won’t be heated. In the garden’s Victorian prime and along with the much larger Jacob Owen vinery that once occupied the northern end of the main garden, at least some of these houses would have been used to grow a range of fruit, flowers and vegetables all year round, including melons, cucumbers, peaches, grapes, strawberries and asparagus, with some crops being grown out of season using a skilled technique known as forcing.

But times are very different now, and so there will be no modern version of the 19th-century boiler (perhaps a type known as a tubular boiler) that once occupied the sunken rectangular chamber uncovered during the excavation work. Equally, there will be no attempt to reinstate the complex system of iron pipes that would have carried the heated water from it and up and around the glasshouses before returning it, cooled, back down again.

Likewise, there will be no attempt to recreate for visitors a flavour of the Victorians’ all-consuming passion for pineapple cultivation, as these plants require constant attention and a temperature of anywhere between 21 degrees and 27 degrees, sustained for a period of up to two years, before they will produce their tropical fruits. And visitors are also unlikely to see a completely faithful reproduction of a Victorian melon house as it would have appeared 150 years ago, with each fruit lovingly suspended in its own melon net, held in place by training wires fixed to the slanting roof. It would simply be too time-consuming.

But all that said, Ashtown’s replicated glasshouses will be as faithful to the original designs as possible, referring to historical documents such as the mid-19th century architectural drawing of the buildings kept in the National Archives. Other surviving Victorian glasshouses to be found elsewhere in the Phoenix Park, including one close to Dublin Zoo, will also serve as reference points. And if the recent, OPW-commissioned, award-winning restoration of the vast Turner Peach House in the gardens of Aras an Uachtarain is anything to go by, then Ashtown’s reinstated glasshouses will undoubtedly impress.

Interestingly, the OPW has also decided that this section of the walled garden will now be renamed. “We’ve been calling it the slip garden or the cutting garden but it would probably be more accurate to call it a frameyard,” explains Dr McCullen. “It was the more utilitarian section of the garden, and so along with the glasshouses, the pits and the frames, it housed a lean-to coal bunker, a fruit store, a mushroom store and a small potting shed.”

While there’s not enough money in the OPW kitty to fund the reconstruction of any of these other garden buildings any time soon, the hope is that the three glass structures will be rebuilt in time for the horticulture festival, Bloom 2012. But quite unlike their Victorian predecessors, these 21st-century versions will all be very much on view to visitors.