Charlemont began with the kitchen garden. We know that he was very interested in fruit growing because he wrote about the various methods of fruit growing in his "Traveller’s Essays" He gave a description of how vines were propagated on one of the Greek Islands; "The best slips were bound together like a bunch of twigs and buried in a dunghill until they had pushed out roots and leaves and then carefully separated before planting out, when the forced leaves would fall off and be replaced by the new growths."
As you would expect his plan for his kitchen gardens was a very grand. His consultant gardener was Matthew Peters. He planned it in the shape of a polygon. He modeled it on some of the gardens he had seen in Italy with a lay out of paths radiating from the centre. At the centre he had a sculpture of fighting gladiators. This was a copy of a famous piece by the sculptor Simon Vierpyl whom he brought to Ireland in 1756. In the same year he completed the walls round the garden.Charlemont intendedhis gardens to be open to the public at all times but after being mugged one evening while walking in the garden he closed the gates and there after only invited guests were allowed in. At this time he also built a great stove which was used to heat his hot house where he grew pineapplea and melons. This hot house must have been pretty posh because we find a reference to it in the papers of Lady Northumberland, the wife of the Viceroy. Apparently she was invited to breakfast in Marino and she was served in the stove room. She wrote " I went in my post chaise with Mrs Graham to Lord Charlemont's at Marino with whom we found Lord Drogheda. We walked through the kitchen garden which is six and a half Irish acres to his hot house - it is one hundren and seventy feet long; we breakfasted in the ante-room. The walls were tapestried with myrtle and an innumerable quantity of flowering plants perfumed it on every side by their fragrance............... We then visited the stables, which were grand and handsome, the farm yard, barns etc. Then we walked through a very pretty shubbery to a very handsome gothic room (the windows of painted glass.)
The garden contained many remarkable features. Firstly there were panoramic views of river, sea and mountains. Then there were all the beautiful trees and shrubs many of which he had brought from abroad. There were many ponds, lakes and a cascade of rocks. At the top of the principal lake was a gothic room called Rosamund's Bower. This was a type of mini cathedral and was very ornamental. One of the most unusual features of the garden was the root house which was made from the roots and stems of trees. Another feature which we know about was a beautiful ornamental seat which he called a gothic seat.
The" foreign sheep" which grazed the lawns around the Casino were strictly ornamental and were not farm animals in the true sense. John Wesley, who founded the Presbyterian Church visited the Casino and he mentioned the sheep in the same breath as "a great plenty of peacocks". Another man called Bowden wrote of sheep with 4, 6, and 8 horns grazing on the lawns.
A visitor in 1818, after Lord Charlemont's death describes the layout of some of the details of the Gothic Room and the Root House very clearly- "Leaving the temple (The Casino) you enter a close embowered walk which leads to a sheet of water at the extremity of which is a summer house fitted up as a gothic nunnery with stained glass windows. A little distance from this is an hermitage surrounded with shrubs.This building is most ingeniously created with small bits of stems and roots of trees laid horizontally with the ends outward so as to form the face of a building, each bit being cut through smooth, and the different woods shewing different colours. They are laid according to the taste of the architect and resemble something like mosaic work".