The National Botanic Garden in Dublin

Technically, my first stop after the airport was my B&B, even though it was only about 9 in the morning and check-in wasn’t until 2 or 3. I knew this was going to happen, so I’d prepped myself for having an unbelievably long day (in retrospect, I maybe should have taken a long nap during the day before I flew out, but I was so nervous it didn’t even occur to me). I didn’t even know if they’d let me store my bags there pre-check-in, but I thought… best case, they will. Worse case, they won’t, and I’ll sit in their waiting/living room for a few hours and read or even nap. But they did, so I dropped my stuff and went off to the Botanic Garden. It was the kind of place I’d go anyway, but when I saw this building when looking at online pictures, there was no way I was going to turn that down.

I mean….! That’s straight up out of Mary Poppins, right?! I mean, other than this is Ireland and that was England. Still. that greenhouse is gorgeous, and if I could have a smaller one on my property….? I’d let the tortoises live in there AND be able to put some tables for repotting plants and starting new ones.

The kinds of people I’m used to seeing at, say, Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, seem to mostly be people who love plants, people who are showing plants to other people who look a little bored and tired of walking around in the heat.

This garden was full of people treating it like a park. There were young parents pushing babies in prams, walking together, talking. There were families, with kids playing in the grass. There were old men sitting on benches just watching the birds. It was terribly picturesque, to the point of me wondering… is it always like this? And I gather it’s not, in that what happened was that the days I was in Dublin the weather was unusually lovely, so whole families were getting out and just soaking up the sun while they could. I am not used to people seeking OUT the sun, I’m used to people hiding away from it, in air conditioning! It was fun, refreshing, unusual. And everyone was…. how do I say this… open. Everyone was talking, smiling, laughing with each other. There weren’t fifty people all with headphones on or earbuds in, listening to fifty different things and ignoring forty-nine other people. They were talking to each other, engaging with each other, and the air was filled with laughter and voices.

And the plants! The birds! The flowers! The trees! My god, this tree!

This tree has seen some shit, y’all. I only took two pictures of it and I’m already thinking I should have taken more. Whole books of fairy tales could be written about this tree.

I took a gazillion (okay, sixty ish) photos there, and if you’re into flowers and birds and plants, you can see the pictures here.

I was getting tired and a little bit punchy, and it felt like I’d been there forever although it was really only about two hours. I knew there was a large cemetery nearby, from looking at the map… but I didn’t realize it was RIGHT NEXT DOOR. I could see it through a couple of fences along the garden edges. But I could not for the life of me figure out how to get there. Every gate or archway that looked like it might go to the cemetery was either closed and locked, or marked “Staff Only.” So I did what any person who thought they were going crazy might do, and I sat on a bench and watched people for about fifteen minutes, until I saw a couple walk down a little walkway I hadn’t seen, behind some bushes, and next thing I knew they were on the other side of the fence in the cemetery. So I followed them, and had my next adventure!

I don’t think it was possible to take a BAD photo in the Botanic Garden.

Stay tuned for more. xoxo and thanks, y’all!