The ultimate pleasure gardens for the big kid in all of us!
I LOVE gardening. I could sit and look at my wife hoeing and mowing all afternoon – on summer days I’ll even relax with my Pimms cocktail in hand and offer the odd encouraging word.
She should complain though at the heavy lifting in our 100ft back garden, Alex Slazenger has 47 acres to maintain just down the road on Powerscourt Estate. Alex is laid up though at the moment, having broken his foot, not in the gardens, but from rising sharply from his seat at home while tending to the kids.
He is going stir crazy, it is Spring and he wants to get out into the gardens with his five-man team, and who could blame him?
Powerscourt Gardens is one of this country’s greatest and most visited attractions, voted No. 3 in the world’s top ten gardens by National Geographic. I have been here many times, my wife likes to shop in Avoca in the house.
Today though we are privileged to be getting a personal tour of the house with its 800 years of history – a fire gutted the interior in 1974 but it was meticulously restored and was opened to the public 21 years ago – and the gardens.
You can take a 90-minute 1.5km Garden of the Gods General Adult Tour which includes 22 stops or opt for the shorter 60-minute eight-stop family action quest. In the best hands, and Powerscourt couldn’t be under better care than Alex, gardens are a natural playground.
The grotto, amid the Japanese Gardens, is the oldest part of the gardens and takes my eye, possibly as this is where the Viscounts and their friends would come to party.
One can imagine too that this must have been a magical place to grow up, playing tag between the statues of Apollo Belvedere and Diana in the Italian Gardens, filled by the 6th and 7th Lord Powerscourt from their travels to the great gardens of Europe, Versailles and the Schonbrunn.
Or play hide and seek behind the tallest trees in the country. It is doggie heaven too (there’s a pet cemetery here too). Our guide, the ency-
clopedic Jill takes her Labrador, or perhaps her lab takes her down through the 240-year-old Bamberg Gate to the River Dargle every day.
My wife is dragging me away too, we have had our picture taken in front of the Triton Fountain and its winged horses, modelled on Bernini’s Triton Fountain in Rome, and she wants to catch the shops before they close.
We leave with a jacket – she picks one for me not unlike one Monty Don wears.
This summer she’ll be drinking the Pimms in our mini-Powerscourt Garden and I’ll be doing the hoeing and mowing.