History of the Demesne

A 'demesne' consists of the lands held by an estate for its own use and occupation, incorporating gardens, farmlands, woods and buildings. This system can be traced back to the early mediaeval period, when home grown items were set aside to produce both goods and profit for the estate. In the 18th and 19th centuries various styles and fashions of landscape ornamentation created new emphases and changes of garden size and layout.

The small kitchen garden and orchard originally developed at Birr is completely different from the garden today enjoyed by thousands of visitors to the demesne every year. Birr Castle Demesne has become world famous for its exotic tree and plant collections, rivers and lake, formal gardens, terraces and wildflower meadows.

Fourteen successive generations of the Parsons family have left their mark on the demesne through continuous planting, building, arrangement and creation of features ranging from the practical to the romantic.

The beginnings of the Formal Gardens were laid out in the early 1700's and the famous Box Hedges were planted. Around the middle of the 18th century, the Fourth Baronet, Sir William Parsons, landscaped the park. He turned bogland into a lake and planted beech trees.

The Third Earl and Countess, as well as building the Great Telescope, instituted various projects around the demesne in an attempt to provide occupation for the people of the area during the Irish Great Famines in the middle 19th century. The Fourth Earl, also an engineer developed the aquatic section of the demesne still further.

The most recent generations of Earls and Countess have concentrated much of their time and energies on the development of the demesne.

The Fifth Earl (1908 to 1918) and Countess laid the foundations of the great plant collection, planting the first of the rare, valuable and unusual plants and trees for which the demesne is famous. When the Fifth Earl inherited in 1908, he flattened the earthworks beyond the moat along the river, making the Terraces where herbaceous borders now give colour below the walls of the moat.

After his early death in the First World War, his son succeeded as Sixth Earl and became a plants man of great renown. His marriage to Anne, daughter of the Messels of Nymans, a famous garden of the National Trust in the South of England, greatly strengthened his latest development. The Sixth Earl sponsored and subscribed to plant collecting exhibitions to the Americas and Eastern Asia and arranged for the first major exhibition to be undertaken by a Chinese, when he was on his honeymoon in Peking in 1935. The seeds from all these exhibitions flowed back to be sown at Birr, which now has, as a result, one of the world's greatest collections of trees and shrubs, and one that is particularly strong in species of Chinese and Himalayan origin.

The Seventh Earl and Countess (1979 to present) inherited a complex system of gardens which were difficult to maintain to the standard of their predecessors, who enjoyed the services of many more gardeners.

They have opened the gardens to the public all year round and are continuing to create new planting features while restoring older features.

Propagation and replenishment of old stock continues at Birr in every generation. Recently, an ambitious restoration programme was undertaken in conjunction with the Great Garden of Ireland Restoration Programme, an initiative of the Irish Department of Tourism. This will restore famous Birr features such as the collection of old fashioned roses and the box parterre in the formal gardens. These were designed by Anne Countess of Rosse to celebrate her marriage in 1935. The terraces below the castle , the winter gardens between the drives and the river garden on the other side of the Camcor river are also being restored. Other features will be newly designed, such as the water pond in the Walled Garden. Victorian buildings to be renewed include the Glasshouses, the Ice House where food was preserved before refrigeration and the boat house built in 1888 to house birch bark canoes from British Columbia in Canada.

A portfolio of drawings produced by Samuel Chearnley and the Third Baronet, Laurence Parsons in the 1740's, includes designs envisaged for the demesne but never realised. As part of the Great Gardens of Ireland Restoration Programme, some of these follies will now be constructed, strengthening links to previous generations.

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Ireland's Historic Science Centre   Birr Co Offaly Ireland