Value of Dublin's parks highlighted

Where in Dublin would you find a gardening staff of 330, a budget of £10 million a year, and gardens amounting to some 2,000 hectares?

The answer is, in the 750 public green spaces which make up Dublin Corporation's parks. From Phoenix Park to St Anne's Park in Raheny to the small green spaces in many of the city's Georgian squares.

The corporation has published a brochure, Dublin City Parks, aimed at familiarising Dubliners with the green spaces throughout the city. It also aims to preserve their heritage.

Some of the more off-beat items revealed in the new booklet are that the Cabbage Garden got its name because Cromwell's soldiers used it to grow cabbages; St Catherine's Park and Wolfe Tone Park were originally cemeteries; and the water for Powers and Jameson whiskey was sourced from Blessington Street Basin, now a quiet park.

Sports facilities in the parks include golf, tennis, cycle lanes and basketball courts.

One, perhaps more exotic, sport was ballooning, which was undertaken by Richard Crosbie - now commemorated in the Richard Crosbie Tavern - in the Ranelagh Gardens shortly after their creation in 1775.

The pleasure gardens, as they were known, were bought by a teaching order of nuns, and in 1840 the convent became totally enclosed. When the lands were developed for housing in the mid-1980s the small park was opened to the public, thereby restoring a 200-year connection with the pleasure gardens.

The brochure is available from Dublin Corporation Parks and Landscape Services, Civic Offices, Wood Quay, Dublin 8.