Image: Irish Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Irish Museum of Modern Art will stage a free ‘IMMA Master Garden Talk & Walk with Mary Condon’ on 12 August 2026, bringing visitors into the Formal Gardens at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham for an hour-long tour focused on biodiversity, ecology and garden history. The event is listed for 1.15pm to 2.15pm, with the meeting point at the Upper Terrace in the Formal Gardens.
According to IMMA’s event listing and August talks bulletin, Mary Condon, OPW Head Gardener at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, will lead the walk. The museum says the session will be an informative stroll around the Master’s Garden, with discussion of the commitment required to sustain a range of green spaces, formal gardens and meadows across the site. Booking is required through the IMMA website.
The talk is part of IMMA Talks, the museum’s public programme of recorded events that opens up conversations around its exhibition programme and permanent collection. IMMA says the talks initiative is intended to bring audiences deeper into the thinking and making of contemporary art, while also extending into broader themes connected to the museum’s grounds and site.
This particular walk places the gardens themselves at the centre of the programme. IMMA describes the Master’s Garden as a space where hidden ecologies, native planting and sustainable landscape practices support pollinators, birds and other urban wildlife. The site’s formal design is presented alongside its ecological role, with the museum framing the gardens as living ecosystems rather than static ornamental grounds.
The museum’s account of the garden’s history traces its development from a pleasure garden to a market garden that supplied vegetables and fruit for hospital residents. IMMA also notes that the gardens were later restored under the guidance of Elizabeth Morgan and are now managed by Condon and her team at the Office of Public Works. The page adds that the gardens sit below the level of the Royal Hospital building and were originally shaped in keeping with the fashion of the time.
IMMA links the walk to its longer-standing interest in ecology and site-specific programming. On the talks page, the museum references its broader environmental and research strands, including biodiversity talks developed through the ‘Green Cube’, exhibitions such as ‘Reverse Migration, a Poetic Journey’ by Cecilia Vicuña, and the museum’s eco-festival ‘Earth Rising’. The August bulletin also points listeners to the museum’s podcast archive, including ‘IMMA Past Futures # 7: Digging Deep’, an episode with city archaeologist Ruth Johnson on the deep history of the site.
The event is set for Wednesday 12 August 2026 in the Formal Gardens at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin 8. IMMA says participants should dress for the weather and wear comfortable flat shoes, as the walk will take place outdoors and may involve uneven ground.
