Addison's Walk

A double row of yews in Ireland's national botanic garden may predate the garden itself by roughly sixty years. Thomas Tickell, a minor poet and friend of the essayist Joseph Addison, lived on this land from 1736 until his death in 1740, and is said to have planted this avenue in Addison's memory. The Dublin Society did not acquire the site to found the gardens until 1795, more than fifty years after Tickell died, a gap none of the surviving accounts explain, so treat the 1730s planting date as informed tradition rather than settled fact. What survives is real regardless of who is right: a dark, formal walk of clipped yew running through a garden otherwise built for scientific display rather than sentiment, doing exactly what a memorial avenue is supposed to do, nearly three centuries on. Whether Joseph Addison ever actually visited Glasnevin is a question the garden's own historians admit they cannot answer, but his name has outlasted the argument regardless. The National Botanic Gardens are free to enter and open every day of the year except Christmas Day.