The Botanic Gardens Audioguides
Download the free, official National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin mobile tours from the Guidigo App, available in Google Play or App Store. There are three wonderful audioguides available – yellow, red, and green – and each can be enjoyed from the comfort of your armchair at home (the tours are illustrated in the app), or while walking around the Gardens themselves and seeing the sights in person. Best of all, each tour is completely FREE.
The National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin teamed up with Ingenious Ireland* to bring you these three tours of the Gardens. Funding for this project was granted by the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport under the Cultural Technology Grant Scheme of 2010. Scroll down for a description of the theme of each tour.
The Yellow Tour
The Yellow Tour explores Glasnevin’s historic highlights. Among other things, you will see a poetic avenue of yew trees, the last rose of summer that inspired Thomas Moore, and a pine tree that is a living fossil.
Follow the Yellow signs in the Gardens, and allow 40-60 minutes for the tour. The path for this tour is universally accessible.
The Red Tour
The Red Tour takes you to the river and back, and features wildlife, plant hunting and philosophy. Hear about the alphabet tree with many names, the golden age of plant collecting, a history of the world through the rose, Kingfishers and sparrowhawks, the soul of a plant, phenological plants and climate change, and the search for the handkerchief tree. If you are lucky, you might see a kingfisher or otter by the river.
Follow the Red signs, and allow 40-60 minutes for the tour. Most of the route is universally accessible, but there are steps at Stop 3.
The Green Tour
The Green Tour explores our historic glasshouses – the Great Palm House and Richard Turner’s Curvilinear range – and the remarkable and exotic plants they contain. Hear about the source of tea tree oil, Proteus and plate tectonics, plants that eat sheep, a tree with no leaves, as well as the loneliest plant in the world, and Ireland’s banana crop.
Follow the green signs, and allow 40-60 minutes for the tour. The path for this tour is universally accessible.
*Mary Mulvihill (1956-2015)
It was with great regret we heard of the untimely death of Mary Mulvihill on 11th June 2015. Mary founded Ingenious Ireland to channel her passion for Ireland’s science heritage, and to bring to life the stories she told in her books, talks, and walking tours around Dublin. In 2007 she made a series of programmes for RTE Radio 1 titled ‘Washed, Dried and Pressed’ about the work of the National Herbarium at the Botanic Gardens. The audio tours of the gardens sprang from Mary’s passion to make science accessible to all. We remain ever grateful to Mary for the patience, schooling, infectious enthusiasm, and skills she imparted to us in assembling the 30 stories in our walking tour app.
We also thank GuidiGo for helping us to carry on bringing these audio tours to future generations as a wonderful memorial to this sadly missed communicator of science.
