|
Dit bamboepark is
zeker de moeite waard als je in Ierland op vakantie bent!
The modern areas of
Bamboo Park were created in 1999 by Serge de Thibault and his wife
Claudine on the same pattern of the Bambouseraie in Anduze, near
Alès in the South of France which is the largest bamboo park in
Europe, existing since more than 75 years.
Where those have only bamboos, the Park in Glengarriff has also
quite a magnificent range of palm trees and tree ferns to show.
On your strolls
through Bamboo Park you will discover 13 stone pillars. They have an
unknown origin. They are suspected to be ancient, although their
date is unknown, and their religious significance is only
speculative. Maybe one day someone will be able to tell ?
But the actual age of
big parts of the Bamboo Park is much older, its history began with
the Old Garden, now open to the public and adjacent to the Bamboo
Park.
Writing in 1910, Wyndham Fitzherbert noted that Lady Ardilaun had
established a garden at Glengarriff on a "delightful spot sloping
down to the water". Some years earlier, Fitzherbert reported, a
house had been planned to accompany the garden, but this had never
been carried out and the place had become "somewhat of a wilderness".
It was however, "most beautiful" and could easily be transformed
into "a charming garden". Fitzherbert mentioned rare rhododendrons,
both species and varieties, and the largest Crinodendron hookerianum
he had ever seen, twenty feet high, twelve feet through and covered
in July with seed pods from its highest shoots to the base.
The garden described by Fitzherbert was located in the townland of
Reenmeen East on lands subsequently bequeathed by Lady Ardilaun to
her godson, Captain Simmy White, and sold by him for housing
development. It seems probable that elements of Lady Ardilaun's
garden survived and prospered in the still outstandingly beautiful
gardens of Monks Harbour.(in Nigel Everett, Wild Gardens, The Lost
Desmenes of Bantry Bay). |
 |