Kylemore Abbey’s magnificent gardens are a nuns legacy (2024)

A large green wooden gate set into a long red brick wall leads to one of the finest Victorian walled gardens in Ireland. I have already visited Kylemore Abbey’s garden twice this year and will be back for more come late summer and autumn since the changes in colours and scents are such a pleasure. I am no gardener and stand in awe of its beauty, bees and blooms. I want to see the ripening figs, whose scent reminds me of holidays in France, and the change in flowerbeds from the purple of the first crocuses to the burnished reds of autumn.

The origin of walled gardens can be traced back to the paradise gardens of Persia, which were not originally designed for floral displays or vegetable planting but as spaces to enjoy for serenity and contemplation.

When walled gardens became commonplace in monasteries, the same ecclesiastical architecture was used for their layouts, which featured the straight lines and motifs of the religious buildings, as well as an overriding sense of order.

Walled gardens are perfect examples of how nature and architecture can be combined to create a space that is functional, aesthetically pleasing and offers opportunity for spiritual reflection. In this respect, the walled garden of Kylemore Abbey is a lasting tribute to the ethos and industry of the order of Benedictine nuns that have made Kylemore their home.

The original castle at Kylemore was designed in the 1860s by James Franklin Fuller, the Irish actor, architect and novelist. His client was Mitchell Henry, a wealthy English doctor of Irish extraction. Henry and his Irish wife, Margaret, fell in love with the area and the hunting lodge on the estate during their honeymoon in Ireland. The castle sits across Pollacappul lake at the foot of Dúchruach mountain near Letterfrack in Connemara, and Kylemore Abbey, as it is now known, remains one of Ireland’s most impressive sights to this day.

Yet in 1874 Margaret died of a fever in Egypt, leaving Henry to raise their nine children. The fine neo-gothic church built close to the lakeshore was constructed in her memory with different columns of marble from each of the four provinces of Ireland.

The story of how the nuns came to reside at Kylemore is one of resilience. Fleeing the catastrophe of the First World War, they braved the long journey from war-torn Ypres in Belgium. They briefly took sanctuary in England before crossing to Co Wexford and settling on the west coast of Ireland.

In 1920 the order bought the estate for £45,000 and went on to establish a girls’ school and monastery on the site. The nuns have made quite the impact since.

The life, work and prayer of the sisters who live here lend the area a sense of peace and spirituality. Stewardship is a key principle of the Benedictine order, and, like the Benedictines who live at Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, they set store by bringing knowledge and culture to the community.

The order is autonomous and while the sisters follow the teachings of Saint Benedict, they each have their own rules or values. The nuns who came from Ypres were a closed order, but when they arrived in Connemara it was decreed that the “walls” of their monastery would extend to the mountains that surround them, thereby allowing them to reach out to the community.

The sisters founded the international boarding school, which included local pupils in the intake, and later opened the estate to visitors. Though the school no longer operates, the association with learning continues through the abbey’s partnership with the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana.

In addition to continuing the restoration of the garden first started by Sister Magdalena FitzGibbon, which had become completely overgrown by 1990, the order has created a café and craft shop.

Sister Genevieve, who is Australian by birth, started making chocolates for sale and has also turned her talents to making floral soaps. Sister Karol teaches singing and piano to local children and makes postcards from her botanical drawings. The sisters also produce their own jams.

The garden at Kylemore is a triumph of vision, labour and patience, which are the defining characteristics of all great gardeners. Passing through the south garden gate, which 33 years ago was a tangle of overgrowth and ruin, you are now greeted by manicured lawns and flowerbeds that fall away to a central pathway and rise again towards the remains of magnificent glasshouses.

There are eight and a half acres of walled garden, six of which include the formal garden and the kitchen garden, which has one of the largest herbaceous borders in Ireland.

Thick walls are built from limestone and all apart from the lower section, which receives little sunlight, are lined with bricks brought from Glasgow. These help to hold the heat of the sun and provide a more consistent temperature for the plants as well as protecting the glasshouses from high winds. Abundant lichens hang from the trees, testament to the moisture and purity of the air.

The northern wall hosts a quaint gardener’s house which, newly restored, evokes a sense of what it was like at the time that Henry was living there with his family.

Although there are no existing documents from the head gardeners of old, Anja Gohlke, the head gardener at Kylemore for the past 20 years, has been able to recover information from magazine and newspaper articles published over the past 100 years.

It is clear that they did once grow pineapples at Kylemore. “I have managed to zoom in on old photographs from the Lawrence Collection [photos of Ireland from 1870 to 1905],” says Gohlke, “and enhance old photos of the glasshouse on the western side. They would have needed a constant 30C heat to grow the pineapples, bananas and other tropical plants.”

The unrenovated glasshouses reveal the bones of the lime kiln heating system that made growing these exotic fruits possible.

Most of the information gathered on the garden came from a bill of sale in 1903, when the castle was sold to the Duke and duch*ess of Manchester. The garden at the time sported 21 glasshouses, including four vineyard glasshouses that made wine from the muscat grape. According to the bill of sale, there was also a banana house, a fernery, a palm house, a tropical house and a fig house along with conservatories.

Peaches from Kylemore, wrapped in banana leaves, were sold at markets in Dublin and London. The walled garden also produced nectarines, melons, tomatoes, peppers and aubergines.

The garden is regarded as Victorian since the planting plan is pre-1901, and today Gohlke tries to stick to plants from that era. “They are increasingly difficult to come by,” she says, “and Brexit has really made it hard.

“We have elevated lawns, which are indicative of a Victorian garden but require huge manual labour. There are eight full-time gardeners plus three student gardeners.”

In Henry’s time there would have been more staff. “They would have had 40 full-time gardeners and up to 50 in summer,” Gohlke says.

Moving beyond the walled garden, I was taken on a walk through the oceanic temperate rainforest by Inez Streefkerk, the biodiversity officer. “Atlantic moisture and the Gulf Stream create the mild temperature and high humidity climate,” she says. “Layers of mosses on the trees and bryophytes — ferns that take their nutrients not from the trees but from the air — are signs of oceanic rainforest.”

Streefkerk explains that the estate has recently undertaken a rhododendron clearance project. “The Henrys and other large estate owners in Connemara brought in rhododendrons, which are native to the Iberian peninsula and Asia,” she says. “Although for a few weeks a year in May and June they have a gorgeous purple flower that covers vast tracts of the landscape, they are extremely invasive and choke everything on the forest floor, preventing saplings from seeding and other indigenous plants from growing as they fight for light and nutrients as well as space.”

The estate owners “were ignorant of the repercussions of these non-native plants at the time”, she says, “but we have no excuses now. We must be careful what we plant.

“We renovated and created 8km of walks during the Covid lockdowns and also planted 2.5 acres of forest. We host 500,000 native black bees and harvest our own Kylemore honey with the bee keeper Martin O’Currain from Spiddal.”

Kylemore Abbey is a wonder of human ingenuity and tells a story of vision, community, craftsmanship and an ongoing legacy of education and spirituality. Its history and continued relevance make it a destination as much for the day tripper and garden enthusiast as those seeking a deeper connection to Ireland’s religious and cultural heritage.

How much time you spend at Kylemore depends on whether you meander in quiet reflection or have an area of particular interest. It can take between four and five hours to see everything, including a stop at the café, which serves lunch and baked goods made in house by the head chef, John O’Toole, and his team.

In a fast-paced age of instant access, rapid communication and demand for immediate results, Kylemore Abbey’s garden serves to remind us that our natural world moves at a slower pace, one that allows contemplation of our environment and our place in it.

Kylemore Abbey is open seven days a week from 10am to 6pm; for tickets visit kylemoreabbey.com