Catherine FitzGerald is supervising three of her four children and their friends as they prepare vegetables they have just picked from the family’s walled garden at Glin Castle, County Limerick in the west of Ireland. Meanwhile her husband, Dominic West, has been tied into a frilly flowered apron by the kids and is whisking mayonnaise with the help of a YouTube video, as he is a novice in such culinary matters. It’s a far cry from the award-winning actor’s role as Prince Charles in the Netflix series The Crown, let alone the hard-drinking Baltimore police officer Jimmy McNulty in The Wire.
We are joined for dinner by Catherine’s mother, Olda, in the formal dining room, the deep red walls of which are lined with portraits of FitzGerald ancestors, for Catherine is the eldest of three daughters of Desmond, the 29th (and last) Knight of Glin, who died in 2011. He and Olda ran the castle for a while as a boutique hotel, and now that Catherine and Dominic have taken it over, it can be let out as a whole and used for events.
Catherine has an esteemed career in her own right as a landscape designer, and the 10 acres of garden at Glin—the perfect place for climbing trees and making dens in childhood—have been her professional playground in adult life. For the past 25 years, her parents pretty much let her have the run of it planting- and design-wise.
“It was so nice of them,” she says, laughing. “I made so many mistakes; it must have been infuriating.”
As with all her work, be it a grand residence such as Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland or a small West London garden, she is very aware that “the genius of the place” is what informs everything at Glin, where the warming air of the Gulf Stream provides a mild—if somewhat damp—climate.
The present house was built in the 1780s (the next generation added the Gothic castellations), but it stands on a much older history, which the gnarled and twisted sessile oaks on the grounds suggest; these are descendants of the Killarney forest that once covered the whole area down to the River Shannon estuary, which Glin overlooks.
“They circle the garden and create an embrace and a link to ancient Ireland,” says Catherine, the fourth generation of women to make her gentle mark on the garden. “It is all about Glin’s unique atmosphere; it has such a powerful spirit.”
Other impressive trees that thrive here have come from farther shores, such as the massive spreading Monterey pine near the house, Drimys winteri from Chile, and a Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica), the pivot of the garden, planted by Catherine’s grandmother in the 1930s. It creates a division between the formal wide lawns lined with yew topiary and the wilder “land of the oak” beyond.
Here mown paths meander through long grass and wildflowers, and in the shady woodlands or tucked away behind shrubbery, you never know what you might encounter, be it a stone circle created by Desmond, a clump of giant gunnera, or an 18th-century grotto.
“The farther you go, the more you are meant to lose yourself,” says Catherine, who is constantly adding layers of planting to extend the seasonal interest and create new focal points.
The walled garden is where her design input is most evident. Olda reinstated a formal layout, and Catherine has taken the planting further, with long double borders on either side of the path by the south-facing stone wall: Here Irish yews maintain some sense of order among a crowd of herbaceous plants jostling in a joyous jig of color and form, while the towering stems of tender Echium pininana thrust toward the heavens above them.
Dominic, who has known the place since he and Catherine were at Trinity College Dublin together, is ever in admiration for what his wife has done at Glin.
“The garden is Catherine’s masterpiece that she has been working on all her life, and it is central to her idea of home. When she is out there, her spirit is unassailable.”
The 15-plus bedroom castle is available for private rental: Sip whiskey by the fire, explore the garden, and play hide-and-seek behind the topiaries. Learn more at glin-castle.com.
Featured in our September/October 2023 issue. Photography by Britt Willoughby Dyer; Written and Produced by Caroline Donald.
