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Tour public and private gardens in two of Ireland's most special areas: Connemara and the Burren. Your hosts, Betsey Mayer and John Brennan will introduce you to these regions and to gardens that express the unique character of the landscape where they were created. Through garden visits and walks you will experience the landscape directly and often meet the people who made the gardens. The hospitality and warmth of the Irish has to be experienced to be believed.
From Shannon airport we will travel by small bus, staying several nights in each location, allowing ample time for photographs and sketching.
John Brennan is an artist and educator who has led groups of artists on trips to Ireland for twenty years. He had his own landscape company in the Boston area and now resides in Connemara and in New Hampshire. Betsey Mayer is a painter and landscape designer who lives in the Boston area and has made many trips to Ireland. The itinerary they have developed for this tour is based upon their own explorations in Ireland.
The tour will start in rugged and wild Connemara where we will stay in a 19th century castle hotel. Highlights of the tour will include a trip to Ballynahinch Castle with its trails, woods, gardens, and river, the Headquarters of the Connemara National Park, and the Victorian walled garden at Kylemore Abbey. You will also have the opportunity to visit two award winning gardens, each created slowly over many years by its owner, where we will be treated to private tours. The owners will take us through their gardens and tell us a about their vision. One garden is a remarkable series of "rooms" in a hazel wood, along a stream. The other has a rich profusion of flowering herbaceous perennials, skillfully composed with so that the boundaries of each garden area create their own mood and yet lead you to the next garden area.
Our next stop will be the Burren, a landscape that is unique geologically and that is rich in ancient sites and monuments. History and culture are entwined within the physical presence of this landscape. Once covered by a warm sea, the sediment that filtered down became hills of limestone rock. Although very stony the fissures in the rocks support a great variety of wildflowers. We will stay in the seaside town of Ballyvaughan. From there we can visit burial sites of ancient peoples and remains of medieval abbeys, and observe how the hills are marked with stone walls and farm structures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will begin to understand how farming in the Burren has shaped the landscape that we see today. Highlights of this stay will be a walk to see wildflowers with a local expert on the botany of the Burren, a visit to a recent residential landscape, and visits to other small gardens hidden in the Burren hills.
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We will make a special trip East of the Burren to Thoor Ballylee, the tower where Yeats lived with his family in the 1920's and 30's, and to Coole Park, home of Lady Gregory, the writer, folklorist, and founder of the Abbey Theater. We will visit Yeats's study, climb the winding stairs in the tower, and walk on the paths at Coole Park where these two friends walked.
The tour package includes all bed and breakfasts for 7 nights, all dinners, transportation by private bus, admission to gardens and contributions to charities in lieu of admission fees, special lectures, and services of the tour leaders. Other meals, cocktails, airfare, gratuities and sundries are not included. Tour participants need not be artists nor avid gardeners, only have curiosity, interest, and enthusiasm.
Tour cost is $2500. Please contact Betsey Mayer at betseymm@earthlink.net to sign up for the tour or if you have questions.
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