Gardens of Malahide Castle, Ireland

Malahide Castle, a half-hour’s trip from Dublin, was the family home of the Talbot family for nearly 800 years before becoming a tourism attraction, but the castle itself is only part of the attraction of a visit to Malahide. The gardens and grounds alone would make a worthwhile visit.

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When the Talbots sold the family’s ancient estate to the government in 1976, there were still 240 acres of land around it, now a public park called the Malahide Demesne; within that are about 20 acres of grounds and gardens that are largely the work of Milo Talbot, the last baron to live there.

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Milo Talbot served as a British diplomat, including a spell as ambassador to Laos, was an enthusiastic amateur botanist and deeply involved in finding and preserving endangered plant species, and may also have been a Soviet spy.

The amazing George G was able to identify the site as our One-Clue Mystery answer for the week from the photo above.

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At least that’s what a relative, Stephen Talbot, claimed in a book about him, connecting dots between his having been a Cambridge student under Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, two members of a Soviet espionage ring in the British Foreign Office recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s. Whether or not is not for here, though he did resign from the service shortly after Blunt was unmasked.

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We spent a pleasant couple of hours after our tour of the castle wandering through the grounds, encountering peacocks and being sure that the path we were following must certainly lead to a gate that would take us to the walled garden, home of the botanical collections. We were wrong, of course, but eventually found our way back out to the on-site visitor center, and across to our goal.

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The visitor center, by the way, was a pleasant stop in itself; it’s run on franchise by the Avoca handknit cooperative, with an extensive store and a very pleasant cafe.

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The walled garden was originally built in the 18th century to set aside a kitchen garden for the castle’s vegetable needs. In the 1960s, Talbot redesigned it and redeveloped it as a personal botanical garden, adding a number of features, as well as greenhouses for his speciments.

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The pool, along with its wooden alligator, dates to that period. There’s a distinctly Southern Hemisphere cast to Talbot’s collections; the family also owns considerable land in Tasmania; his sister, who inherited Malahide from him went to live there after selling up, and the current baron lives there.

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Talbot’s collections eventually added up to over 5,000 species, with those unable to live in Dublin’s climate housed in greenhouses, built in Victorian style in the 1960s. As well as Tasmania, Talbot used his southeast Asia connections to add new specimens, and was considered an expert, though without formal training.

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For more on Malahide Castle itself, click HERE for a Gumbo blog.

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