IRISH GARDEN: A CULTURAL HISTORY (PB)

Is there something especially Irish about Irish gardens? Many of the individual gardens visited in this book tend to avoid magnificence in favour of a quiet and domesticated beauty, but nonetheless, they accrue an unusual richness of surface and depth of meaning. Author, Peter Dale rhapsodises on themes of Irishness as though the spirit and soul of Ireland itself were sometimes more visible in these gardens than in the more conventionally visited locations of battlefields, breweries, and pubs.