Patrick Comerford
Tucked away behind the south side of Saint Stephen’s Green and National Concert Hall on Earlsfort Terrace, the Iveagh Gardens are among the finest, but least known, of Dublin’s parks and gardens. I only got to know the gardens in recent years, and so it was a pleasure to have time to explore them with Charlotte when we were back in Dublin for a quick overnight visit at the end of last week.
The Iveagh Gardens claim to be Dublin’s best-kept secret. They were designed by Ninian Niven in 1865 as the grounds for the Dublin Exhibition Palace – a space ‘where the citizens might meet for the purposes of rational amusement blended with instruction’. But for too long, this open area close to Harcourt Street and Hatch Street was a private garden, owned at different times by the Guinness family, when they also owned Iveagh House, and then by University College Dublin, with its main building on Earlsfort Terrace, now the National Concert Hall.
The Iveagh Gardens are an oasis of tranquillity and beauty near the city centre, close to Saint Stephen’s Green and Grafton Street. They include cascades, rustic grottos, sunken lawns, fountains, woodlands, a maze, a rose garden, rockeries and archery grounds.
The Iveagh Gardens is a national property, rather a municipal park, almost completely surrounded by buildings making the place a little difficult to find. I was staying on Harcourt Street on Friday night, opposite the former site of the High School, and entered the Iveagh Gardens from Upper Hatch Street and left at Clonmel Street.
The site was known as Leeson’s Fields in 1756, when it was owned by Joseph Leeson (1701-1783), 1st Earl of Milltown. He gives his name to Leeson Street and built Russborough House, near Blessington, Co Wicklow. Some years later, Lord Milltown leased the land to John Hatch (1720-1797), MP for Swords and the principal developer of Harcourt Street and Hatch Street in 1777-1784.
Hatch, who was an ancestor of the playwright John Millington Synge, sold the site to John Scott (1739-1798), 1st Earl of Clonmell, as his private gardens, and it became known as Clonmell Lawns. Scott was the Attorney General and then Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, and due to his heavy drinking he was known as ‘Copper-Faced Jack’ – remembered in the name of a night club in the area, Copper Face Jack’s.
He gave Clonmel Street its name and his subsidiary title of Lord Earlsfort gives Earlsfort Terrace its name. An underground passage brought Lord Clonmell Earl from his house on Harcourt Street to the gardens without him having to walk on Harcourt Street or Clonmel Street.
There was a plan to continue Clonmel Street through the site of the gardens, linking Harcourt Street to the newly-built Earlsfort Terrace. But this plan never materialised; nor was Lord Clonmell’s tunnel found during archaeological explorations when the Luas line was being built.
Lord Clonmell’s house on Harcourt Street later became the National Children’s Hospital, and is now modern offices. Meanwhile, when he died in 1798, his title and his properties, including Clonmell Gardens, were inherited by his 14-year-old son, Thomas Scott (1783-1838), as the 2nd Earl of Clonmell. The estate was sold in 1810 and when the gardens were opened for public use in 1817 they were named Coburg Gardens after the royal family of Saxe-Coburg.
The entrance to the Coburg Gardens was then from the south side of Saint Stephen’s Green, known as the Royal Horse Bazaar. Several Orangemen were badly injured during a major riot in the park in August 1835. The gardens had fallen into disrepair by 1860, when they were used for grazing sheep and dumping waste.
Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness (1798-1868) acquired the 17-acre site when he co-founded the Dublin Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden Company in 1862 to provide a permanent exhibition of Irish arts and manufactures as well as public reading rooms, flower gardens, and a gas-lit winter garden, modelled on the Crystal Palace in London. He transferred the site to the company, and it was the venue for the Dublin Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden, officially opened by Prince Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1865.
The Iveagh Gardens were designed by Ninian Niven in 1865, as an intermediate design between the ‘French Formal’ and the ‘English Landscape’ styles. A large sunken lawn near the Earlsfort Terrace entrance is one of only two purpose-built archery fields in Ireland. At its east end was a pond and boating tower, now inside the walls of Iveagh House. The cascade, or waterfall flows over an immense rockery, with rocks from each of the 32 counties. The maze is a miniature copy of the maze at Hampton Court in London.
The horticulturist and landscape gardener Ninian Niven (1799-1879) worked for most of his life in Ireland, but was born in Kelvingrove, Glasgow. He came to Ireland in 1827 as the head gardener of the grounds of the official residence of the Chief Secretary for Ireland in the Phoenix Park. Over the course of eight years, he developed his landscaping skills and remodelled the garden.
He became the curator of the Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin in 1834. Four years later, visitor numbers had risen from 7,000 a year to over 20,000, and he established the first horticultural training courses. In 1838, he established the Garden Farm nursery in Clonturk Lodge, Drumcondra.
Niven designed the gardens of many Irish country houses, influenced by his visit to France in the 1830s. In the Phoenix Park, he designed the gardens of the Viceregal Lodge, now Áras and Uachtaráin, the Chief Secretary’s Lodge, and the Under-Secretary’s Lodge, as well as the People’s Garden.
Sir Benjamin’s sons, Edward Cecil Guinness (1847-1927), later Lord Iveagh (1891), and Arthur Edward Guinness (1840-1915), later Lord Ardilaun (1880), bought back the Iveagh Gardens and the buildings in 1870. The site hosted an exhibition of Irish arts and manufactures in 1872. However, this was not a success, the Winter Gardens were sold and removed to England in 1882, and the gardens returned to private ownership and the Guinness family.
Lord Iveagh sold the buildings in 1883 to house the new Royal University of Ireland, but the Guinness family continued to own the gardens. The buildings were adapted after University College Dublin (UCD) was set up in 1908, and the present façade on Earlsfort Terrace was designed by the architect Rudolph Maximilian Butler and built in 1918.
When Éamon de Valera was both Taoiseach and chancellor of UCD, he began talks with Rupert Guinness, 2nd Earl of Iveagh, about the state acquiring Iveagh House at 80 Saint Stephen’s Green and the Iveagh Gardens. The request was turned down in 1937, but Lord Iveagh offered the house and gardens as a gift to the nation in 1939, insisting the Iveagh Gardens must not be built on and must remain a ‘lung’ for Dublin. His gift was accepted and Iveagh House became the Department of Foreign Affairs, while the Iveagh Gardens were re-united with UCD’s buildings on Earlsfort Terrace.
With growing student numbers, UCD had plans in 1961 to build on the Iveagh Gardens. Instead, however, UCD moved to Belfield, the gardens were saved, and eventually they were placed under the management of the Office of Public Works (OPW) in 1991. The OPW aimed to conserve and restore the park, maintaining Ninian Niven’s layout. The Iveagh Gradens opened to the public in 1992, the waterfall or cascade was restored in 1996, and a new entrance from Upper Hatch Street opened in 2003.
In the north-east corner and – appropriately – beside the National Concert Hall, is Elizabeth O’Kane’s 2008 sculpture of Count John McCormack (1884-1945). His voice and charisma made him the most successful concert performer of the early 20th century. He was the first artist to record the World War I song ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. Later, the French Government awarded him the Légion d’Honneur and he was made a papal count by Pope Pius XI in 1928.
Nearby, close to Iveagh House and the Department of Foreign Affairs, a memorial commemorates the lives of human rights defenders who have been killed because of their work.
The memorial was inaugurated on International Human Rights Defenders Day, 9 December 2020, by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, and the Front Line Defenders Executive Director, Andrew Anderson.
The memorial, designed by Grafton Architects, is an Ogham garden with five standing stones, etched with ancient Irish Ogham script, each representing a native Irish tree. The space is enclosed by a crafted metal screen with plaques, bearing the words of people who gave their lives for their causes. They include Bety Cariño, who spoke at a gathering of human rights defenders I attended in Dublin Castle in 2010, and who was shot dead two months later during a peaceful protest in Mexico.
On this side of the Iveagh Gardens, a gate leads into the Readers’ Garden and the Museum of Literature Ireland in Newman House. But more about these tomorrow, hopefully (see HERE.
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