Avondale, to most of us, means Parnell. But the house was built in the late 18th century by a distant relative of his, Samuel Hayes, as Mary Davies tells us in the September issue of The Irish Garden (she is co-editor with Gerry Daly). Hayes wrote the first book in Ireland on planting trees, just over 200 years ago. When he lived in Avondale, garden fashions for big houses were changing from formal layouts - maybe with geometrical paths, fountains and what-not - to the idea of a landscape park. So, in came lawns almost up to the house, rounded contours and generally a more relaxed and natural look. Above all, Hayes believed so passionately in trees that in 1768 he was given a gold medal by the Dublin Society (later the RDS) for the planting of 2,550 young beech trees. He was then 25 years old. Many old woodlands had been cut down to feed the furnaces for iron smelting. And during the late 1700s the society paid bounties for the propagation of timber trees, reaching a total of nearly four million by 1790.
Hayes's book, A practical treatise on planting and the management of woods and coppices, by S. H. Esq MRIA and members of the Committee of Agriculture of the Dublin Society, was published in 1794. He was very particular about the need to avoid drying out of roots when being planted or replanted. A tub of water, thickened to the consistency of cream, should be used for seedling plants, and closed box-carts for larger trees, which should be stood up perpendicularly, so that the roots are not damaged, as might happen if they were carried horizontally. (Labour then, Mary notes, was no problem; he was writing for his fellow landowners.) Capability Brown wasn't so punctilious. And we don't know how many he lost through his methods. Trees are tough, but .. . Anyway, back to Avondale.
In 1904 the Department of Agriculture took it over and set up a training centre for foresters. In 1908 a committee on afforestation produced a report which "became the sacred scripture of Irish forestry", according to Sheila Pim in her biography of Augustine Henry, The Wood and the Trees. Henry, a medical doctor who later studied at a French forestry school at Nantes, had positive views. "Forestry ought to be made to pay. The quicker the returns, the better people will begin to see that there is something in it." Coillte now owns Avondale. Business is business, but a coniferous Ireland is not everybody's idea of green bliss. Eoin Neeson's A History of Irish Forestry (Lilliput 1991) gives a good, well-documented overview.