Salthill Gardens

Salthill Gardens is only about 2 miles from the house we are renting. I saw a notice in the church bulletin for a gardening talk on Monday evening, so I decided to go. The speaker was June Blake, who apparently is famous in Irish gardening circles, and there were about 60 people there (I don’t think the whole town has 60 people in it!). Her talk was great, even though some of it was over my head, but it motivated me to bring the kids over to see the garden the next day.

The amazing flowers began before we even got inside the gate.

This is the courtyard between the owner’s house and the farm building that is the entrance to the garden. The yellow flowers smelled so good, and the black lamp post reminded me of the beginning of the story of Narnia.

This is the opposite side of the courtyard wall and you can see the house in the background. All of the buildings have these rain barrels to collect water for the plants.

Throughout the garden, there are old architectural details that the owner left intact and incorporated into the design of the garden. The archway and wall on the left of the picture are some of those details. The sign in the entryway said the walls were constructed between 1770-1820.

The garden is only a few hundred meters from the sea, so in many places the buildings and walls were decorated with scallop shells.

This is a close-up of the same arch from the picture above, and you can see all the wonderful scallop shells and smaller clam shells. Someone spent a lot of time collecting.

So peaceful and quiet under the canopy of leaves.

The peonies were the first flowers we saw when we stepped through the gate into the garden. They always make me think of my Grandma, so they are my favorite!

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There were so many roses! They were in every corner of the garden, and they smelled so good. We did a little experiment and found that the different varieties of roses have different scents, and each of us had our own favorite scent.

An unusual variety of rose

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Lots of the flowers were growing taller than the children!

The purple foxglove was well over my head, it must have been close to 7 feet high. Kelly couldn’t help but quote her poem about spring and, “…the foxglove’s spire.”

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The owner/gardener seemed partial to purple and yellow. Here’s one I had never seen before.

And another new one, just beginning to bloom.

And that was the end of our tour of Salthill Gardens. It was truly beautiful, I don’t think our pictures did it justice. In the barn there were photos of the progress of work from when the owner began, and it really was just an empty field when she started. I can’t imagine how much time and energy and work went into it, but it was a labor of love and we enjoyed our tour.