Poet Thomas Tickell owned a house and small estate in Glasnevin and, in 1795, they were sold to the Irish Parliament and given to the Royal Dublin Society for them to establish Ireland’s first botanic gardens. A double line of yew trees, known as “Addison’s Walk” survives from this period. The original function of the gardens was to advance knowledge of plants for agricultural, medicinal and dyeing purposes. The gardens were the first location in Ireland where the infection responsible for the 1845–1847 Great Famine was identified. Throughout the famine, research to stop the infection was undertaken at the gardens.
Walter Wade and John Underwood, the first Director and Superintendent respectively, executed the layout of the gardens, but, when Wade died in 1825, they declined for some years. From 1834, Director Ninian Nivan brought new life into the gardens, performing some redesign. This programme of change and development continued with the following Directors into the late 1960s.
The gardens were placed into government care in 1877.
In the winter of 1948/9 Ludwig Wittgenstein lived and worked in Ireland. He frequently came to the Palm House to sit and write. There is a plaque commemorating him on the steps he sat on.
THE BANDSTAND IN BLACKROCK PUBLIC PARK 23 FEBRUARY 2008
Blackrock Park is a pleasant green area overlooking Dublin Bay, in Blackrock County Dublin, and boasts a well equipped children’s playground, cycle path and trees. There is also a picturesque pond containing a small island, and swans can regularly been seen there. The Peace Fountain in the pond was constructed in 1986 to mark International Year for Peace.
As already mentioned I discovered that I had a disk with a large number of photographs from 2008 but for various reasons I could not access or process them until now [December 2022].
I do not remember owning a Canon 24-105mm lens and it is all the more annoying as I recently purchased a Sigma equivalent to use with my Canon 5D MkIII. I should explain, many years ago I purchased a Canon 5D camera and it was an excellent camera but I made the mistake of upgrading to a Canon 1Ds MKIII which proved too be a disaster because the camera was faulty. I returned the body to Canon a number of times but they failed to repair an inherent auto-focus problem so I gave up and decided to switch to Sony. I sold the 5D at a very good price and gifted some lenses to friends but no one was interested in the 1Ds.
About a year ago I decided that I was going to dump the 1Ds but discovered that it produced very good results in manual mode and as a result I purchased a number of second Canon and Sigma lenses.
Earlier this year my local dealer offered me an unused Canon 5D MkIII [it was a demo unit] at an amazing price and I agreed to purchase it providing a GPS unit was supplied with it. I was very pleased with the 5D and purchased a second hand Sigma 24-105 which can be attached to my Sony cameras via a Metabones adapter.
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