Enchanted Gardens

Enjoy this beautiful description of Lambay courtesy of Malahide Historical Society:

Beautiful gardens surround the house and there is also a separate very attractive walled garden. A feature of the island growth is the profuse way in which beautiful fuchsias thrive.

In Lambay, as in Connemara, the soft sea air swiftly turns a low bush into a great hedge, brilliant with showers of crimson blossom. Not often can it be said of an old building that additions covering an even greater area have failed to take away the charm of the old, and still more rarely that they have increased it – but no less is true of Lambay Castle. It is worthy of the island, which is to say much. Today, the castle sits, surrounded by an island of flowers.

On the cliffs grow acres of scurvy-grass, with its creamy white flowers smelling like honey, and flooding the land with blossom. Grass, bracken, heath, rush and blazing with stonecrop and golden samphire, swords bright with the cool grey-blue of sulla verna enclosed by banks of sea pink and great stretches of purple heather- these are the pictures framed by the margin of low water rocks black with fungus or brilliant with yellow lichen. Indeed, one could not be blamed for thinking in the realms of a fairy castle in an enchanted island.