City Parks by Catie Marron

Author:Catie Marron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

’Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,

While the sweet fields do lie forgot

THE IVEAGH GARDENS, not far from St. Stephen’s Green, are modest, not richly appointed, and wear an air of faint melancholy. They suit me, though, and of all the parks in Dublin I like them best. I was already in my forties when I discovered them, quite late. In fact, I should not say discovered, since I am sure I would never have found them by myself. I was introduced to the grounds by a girl whom at the time I was busy falling in love with—fruitlessly, as it would turn out. She was already spoken for, and our trysts, few as they were, had to take place well away from the public gaze of Dublin, one of the world’s most vigilantly prurient cities.

There was a secret place, she told me, that almost no one knew about. We went there for the first time on a hurried but never-to-be-forgotten lunch hour; she brought sandwiches and I, hopefully, a bottle of wine that in the end turned out not to have the desired seductive effect. It was early autumn, and under a Poussin sky the trees were that dry-olive shade that they take on before the final turn, and made a wistful, dreamy rustling high above us in the pale blue air. Before we settled to our picnic she insisted on showing me around what she seemed to consider her private domain. I see us there, clear as day and as if it were yesterday, pacing the gravel paths beside the pleasingly unkempt lawns, under those restive trees. Here are the fountains, there is the archery range—and oh, smell that fragrance wafting from the rose garden over the way! Supposedly there was a maze, too, she said, but she had never been able to find it. I held her hand. It was hopeless, she said, hopeless, and yet she smiled and let her hand rest in mine. It is out of such moments, commonplace yet plangent, that places take on their significance.

The gardens, naturally, have their own past. They are first mentioned publicly in the mid-eighteenth century as Leeson’s Fields. The land was leased to a developer by the name of Hatch, who used it as the garden of a house on Harcourt Street built for the attorney general, Lord Clonmell, an enthusiastic toper who was quaintly and no doubt accurately known as Copperfaced Jack. In 1810 Clonmell House was sold and the space behind it was opened to the public as Coburg Gardens. In the early 1860s the site was purchased by Benjamin Guinness, scion of the brewing family. Benjamin, like so many of the Guinness family then and now, was of a philanthropic cast, and he seems to have lent or perhaps leased the land to the splendidly named Dublin Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden Company, to be the pleasure grounds of the Dublin International Exhibition, held in 1865.

The Exhibition Building, which would in time become

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