Park yourself in Dublin’s finest garden
New exhibition highlights role Phoenix Park has played in capital’s history
Visitors to Phoenix Park can appreciate the impressive beauty and productivity of the Ashtown Victorian kitchen garden. Photograph: Richard Johnston
Gold pen presented by Queen Victoria to William Spalding Wilkie, the Phoenix Park’s brilliant head-gardener-cum-bailiff, on her visit to Dublin in 1861
In a world where many of us don’t have the space or opportunity to garden in the traditional sense, it’s our public parks that provide that vital nourishing connection with the natural world, and none more so than Ireland’s world-famous Phoenix Park. Measuring twice the size of New York’s Central Park and considered to be the largest enclosed urban park in Europe, it’s within its 1,752 acres that generations of Dubliners have experienced what it’s like to stare up into the vast, spreading canopy of a mature tree, drink in the scent of a rose bed in full summer bloom, or marvel at the beauty of a massed display of tulips.
Its more manicured areas aside, its diverse range of semi-natural habitats – mature woodlands, grasslands, wetlands and hedgerows – are home to numerous species of wild birds and animals, including sky larks, kestrels and golden plovers. In short, this very special and historic OPW-managed city park has sown the seeds of a love of nature in many of us.