Mardyke Gardens fail to flower

When Fáilte Ireland’s head of experience development described the newly opened Mardyke Gardens in Cork’s Fitzgerald Park as world-class, she was wrong.

They are not.

What the City Council has achieved is a beautiful outdoor space; what it has most certainly not achieved is a garden of horticultural merit.

We were led to expect a garden of a high standard, but we have been shortchanged.

I commend Cork City Council on redeveloping the park but I am angered and upset at the standard of what has been achieved.

There are some lovely features, like a mature specimen-shaped Taxus, a copse of silver-stemmed Betula jacquemontii, a beautiful Magnolia soulangeana, and some lovely beds of ornamental grasses.

However, there are many dead and poor quality plants. That is unacceptable. Where we had herbaceous beds, we now have dead lavender. Where we had roses, we now have hundreds of Pachysandra, a plant often used in difficult spaces such as the side of a motorway. Fine, perhaps, for a shady corner of a shopping centre car park.

The city council and Fáilte Ireland believe there is a strong tourism market for horticultural and garden attractions, and they hope the Mardyke Gardens will be at the top end of these attractions.

I’m afraid they won’t.

This magical place and this great city deserved better — and didn’t get it.

We had a glorious opportunity here to develop a garden of world renown but we failed — and I want to know why.

lSee ‘Nothing world class about new garden’ in today’s Irish Examiner ‘Property & Interiors’ magazine.