Dr. Christy Boylan will present ‘The Parks and Gardens of Dublin’ at 8pm Jan 08 to the Kilmacud-Stillorgan Local History Society in St. Lawrence’s Parish Centre, Lower Kilmacud Road. Members are free – visitors are €3.
Please note that there is a car parking charge of €1 per hour at this venue – coin payment only. The talk will have as its springing point Dr. Boylan’s book, ‘The Plants & Gardens of Dublin’, an account of the history and development of over 150 parks and gardens in Dublin, each of which has an interesting story.
They include the largest park, the Phoenix Park, to the smallest pocket park around the statue of Anne Devlin in Rathfarnham Village. Dublin has a proud history in the development of public parks, something which was celebrated with a World Parks Congress in 2007.
A native of Ballyjamesduff, Co. Cavan, Dr. Boylan is a landscape architect who graduated from UCD in 1971. His post-graduate studies in Landscape Architecture, Landscape Horticulture and Parks & Recreation Management were pursued at Michigan State University, USA and were completed by 1975. In addition, he received an MBA from DCU in 2023.
Dr. Boylan moved from Dublin Corporation to South Dublin County Council in 1993 to head the newly formed Parks & Landscape Services Department, from which he retired in 2007. During the course of his career, Dr. Boylan had responsibility for landscape design and some of his projects included the Millennium Arboretum in St. Anne’s Park, Clontarf / Raheny; the Croppies Memorial Park at Wolfe Tone Quay, and the Stardust Memorial Park, Coolock.
He also designed the Famine Commemorative Arboretum and Camac Valley Tourist Camping and Caravan Park in Corkagh Park, Clondalkin. Having retired in 2007, he lectured at Technological University Dublin, Blanchardstown until 2025 and currently is an adjudicator for the SuperValu Tidy Towns Competition. Dr. Boylan has written numerous publications and presented papers at national and international conferences.
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