Paxton's Vinery (Lismore Castle Gardens)

The Lismore estate in County Waterford keeps, in its Upper Garden, the walls and terraces commissioned around 1605 by Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. In the nineteenth century the castle belonged to the Dukes of Devonshire. The 6th Duke (1790-1858), known as the Bachelor Duke, had the castle rebuilt from 1850 and asked Joseph Paxton to design elements of the Upper and Lower Gardens. Paxton, who had entered his service as a gardener and become his friend and right-hand man, was by then the designer of the Crystal Palace, built in 1851 for the Great Exhibition in London.

The gardens date the Upper Garden glasshouse to 1853; the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH) places it around 1850, within a range of 1845 to 1855, and gives it a National rating for its architectural, scientific and technical interest.

Over time several bays disappeared and the rest deteriorated: when the inventory recorded it in 2003, it described only eight. In October 2020 the firm Queenstown Restoration began a full restoration: the structure was dismantled, as much original material as possible was salvaged and repaired, and the glasshouse was to be rebuilt with its four missing bays. The gardens expected the work to be finished by spring 2021.

The glasshouse is a single-storey lean-to whose rear (north) wall abuts the defensive wall of the garden. Its roof is made up of a series of small pitched glazed roofs set side by side and carried on an iron ridge-and-furrow frame. On the front, the gables of these roofs form triangular openings fitted with iron casement windows.

The system, which Paxton developed and applied on a vast scale at the Crystal Palace, was meant to let as much light as possible into the house. The NIAH regards it as a work of considerable technical engineering and scientific interest, one that has kept its original form and character.

The whole stands on a random rubble stone plinth wall with a rendered coping. This base also had a horticultural role, since the vines planted outside were passed through it into the house. The gardens describe the glasshouse as the last known example of its design; the restoration begun in 2020 was to give it back all twelve bays.

Built as a vinery, Paxton's glasshouse was first of all a tool for growing grapes. The vines were planted outside, fed through the plinth wall and trained up under the glass along the ridge of each bay.

The glasshouse sits within seven acres of gardens, close to 3 hectares, enclosed by the seventeenth-century defensive walls. They hold a fine collection of magnolias, camellias and rhododendrons as well as herbaceous borders. Since the end of the twentieth century the Devonshire family has also placed sculpture in the gardens, a collection each generation has added to. The gardens still supply the seasonal salads for picnics prepared by the castle chef.

The glasshouse stands in the Upper Garden of Lismore Castle in County Waterford. The castle itself is let as a whole to private guests and cannot be visited, but the gardens are open to the public: the Upper Garden, with its early seventeenth-century walls and terraces, and the more naturalistic Lower Garden below the castle approach, linked to the Upper Garden by a staircase through the Riding House. Allow one to two hours for both. Spring is the season for the magnolias, camellias and rhododendrons. The exhibition and events programme of Lismore Castle Arts rounds off a visit.