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.
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Getting there
National Botanic Gardens, Botanic Road, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, D09 VY63
You can recognise it by the dark, clipped double row of yews forming a formal avenue rather than a single tree. It stands as Addison's Walk in the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin.
Free, open daily except 25 December
Bus routes 9 and 140 from the city centre, or a 20 min walk from Phibsborough
In fruit
red arils on female trees, the only part that is not poisonous
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.