Walled garden glasshouse, Strokestown Park

Strokestown Park belonged to the Mahon family, later Pakenham-Mahon, from the seventeenth century until 1979, when the house and what remained of the estate were sold to a local company. The walled garden is older than the glasshouse: the estate says it was created in 1740 as one large vegetable garden, while the NIAH describes an ornamental walled garden laid out around 1730 (dating range 1720-1740).

In a post of August 2026 the estate dates the glasshouse to the late 1780s and says it was commissioned by Maurice Mahon and designed by James Donnell, an ambitious and expensive addition that was considered a novelty at the time. According to the NIAH, Maurice Mahon (1738-1819) sat in the Irish Parliament for County Roscommon from 1782 and was created Baron Hartland in 1800. Other accounts differ: a 2012 travel article places the peach house and vinery in the late 18th century without citing a document, and a 2022 event page from the estate spoke of nineteenth-century glasshouses.

Exotic fruit belongs to the same story: Henry Pakenham Mahon (1851-1922), an avid gardener, brought back rare plants, and the estate grew pineapples and figs. By the 20th century the garden, untended since the 1960s, had largely been reclaimed by nature. After a decade-long restoration programme it reopened to the public in August 1997. In August 2022, during Heritage Week, the estate showed its newly conserved glasshouses. It announced in October 2015 that the Irish Heritage Trust would take over its management.

The estate states that the glasshouse combines a peach house and a vinery, that the garden has three glasshouses and that a pineapple pit survives. The NIAH record for the walled garden (no. 31811030, surveyed in 2003) describes, in the walled vegetable garden south of the ornamental garden, a viewing tower, a single-storey garden building with a glass house 'to south' and an outbuilding with a slate lean-to roof against the west wall.

Around these structures the walled garden is built of brick and coursed rubble, with cut-stone gate piers. The ornamental garden holds a hexagonal timber gazebo with a slate roof and a pineapple finial, a sundial and a pond; the two-storey viewing tower at the south-west corner of the vegetable garden has a Venetian window.

According to the estate, the glasshouse comprises a peach house and a vinery; the pineapple pit and the vinery are presented as the places where delicate flowers and exotic fruits from across the British Empire were grown for the family's table. Pineapples, figs and plants from distant countries were cultivated here.

The kitchen garden still produces food, worked by volunteers with hand tools. The estate listed wheat, oats, berries, currants, apples, pears, squash, courgettes, onions, parsnips, beetroot and tomatoes there in 2023, and some of the fruit trees, centuries old, still bear. The garden also has one of Ireland's longest herbaceous borders, a fernery, a Victorian rose garden and an exhibition of historic gardening tools.

The glasshouse stands in the walled garden, reached with the garden ticket; the estate invites visitors to step inside, and says its gardens are open throughout the year and need no advance booking.

The visit combines with the Palladian house, the National Famine Museum and the Woodland Café. According to the estate's website, the Serpentine Woodlands are temporarily closed for works. During Heritage Week in August the estate has organised tours and meetings around the walled garden and its glasshouses.