Dreaming. That’s what I keep coming up with. That the west coast of Ireland has a dream-like quality that is not connected to its beauty. Not solely to its beauty. Drive along one of its peninsulas and it’s easy to see visual parallels to, say, California’s Pacific Coast Highway. A horizon overly filled with sea. Sunlight that seems somehow parallel with the horizon. Like it is in your eyes all of the time, making you stupid with the glare and with a beauty you can never finish fully focusing on. It’s breathtaking and occasionally terrifying. But the Pacific Coast Highway has never made me think of mermaids. Really no place does that but this place. It’s always the same. This sense of a charmed landscape.
So much beauty naturally means there are gardeners. Smitten gardeners. Besotted gardeners. Gardeners who have abandoned all else in pursuit of the beauty in this place. And, in fact, all of the above is really just by way of background, offered to allow for the proper introduction of one particular garden, Garnish Island.
A century after its completion, this Edenic landscape idles away its days in a temperate micro-climate created by its proximity to the Atlantic Gulf Stream combined with its sheltered position in Bantry Bay. Thirty-seven acres of island surrounded by sea, the gardens were developed in the first decades of the 20th century by British architect and landscape designer Harold Peto at the behest of Belfast native Annam Bryce and his family. Garnish Island—or Illnacullin as it is also known--is the perfect blend of Italianate gardens, architectural follies and natural beauty. This exquisite formality within an equally exquisite unstructured wildness makes it the very definition of a what is compellingly known as a ‘captured landscape’, a great phrase, that.
I first saw this garden thirty years ago. In the intervening years, the garden’s name and many of its particulars had fallen away and it simply became a memory of myth-like island somewhere off the wild west coast of Ireland. And so it was with special delight to recently come across Garnish Island again. This time on a list of must-see Irish gardens. No surprise there. It has most definitely made the cut for our upcoming The Gardens of The Irish Landscape. We spend a good half day there immersed in dreams of Eden. I hope you will consider joining us. Trust me when I say there is no other place in this wide world like it.