Qualla: Florence Court

Florence Court: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosemary Nelson, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1767, a local farmer named George Willis was walking on Cuilcagh Mountain in County Fermanagh when he noticed two unusual yew saplings. They were growing upright, like columns, rather than spreading like ordinary yew trees. Willis dug them up and replanted one at Florence Court, the house on the lower slopes of the mountain. The Irish Yew, Taxus baccata fastigiata, can only be reproduced by taking cuttings, not from seed. Every Irish Yew in the world today, the upright columnar trees that line graveyards and churchyards across Ireland, Britain, and the broader Anglosphere, descends from that single sapling. The other one died. Willis's tree still stands at Florence Court, roughly a mile southeast of the house, in the overgrown remains of John Cole's early eighteenth-century garden. It is the mother of an entire cultivated lineage, planted in cemeteries from California to New Zealand, surviving even when the house that named it nearly burned to the ground.

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Image: Rosemary Nelson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Florence Court: Named for a Woman from Devon

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Florence Court takes its name from Florence Bourchier Wrey, who died in 1718. Florence was the daughter of Sir Bourchier Wrey, 4th Baronet, of Tawstock in Devon. Her grandmother was Florence Rolle, one of the earliest English women to bear the name. Florence Wrey married John Col...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Florence Court: The Earls of Enniskillen

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Romeparis, CC BY-SA 3.0. Florence Court was the seat of the Earls of Enniskillen from the eighteenth century until 1973. The 5th Earl, John Henry Michael Cole, transferred the house and fourteen acres around it to the National Trust in 1953, an act of foresight that probably saved the building. In 1955, ...

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Image: Romeparis | CC BY-SA 3.0

Florence Court: The Last Earl in Residence

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Plug at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. David Lowry Cole, the 6th Earl of Enniskillen, succeeded his uncle in 1963. David had spent much of his life in colonial Kenya, where he was elected to the Legislative Council in the early 1960s, just before Kenyan independence. He returned to Florence Court with his second wife,...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Plug at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Florence Court: The Yew That Started a Lineage

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photograph created by AWA Ferguson (Blacktav on en.wikipedia) edge trimmed, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Irish Yew is one of the most distinctive trees in the cultivated world. Unlike ordinary yews, which spread sideways with horizontal branches, the Irish Yew grows upright, with branches that hold themselves vertical. The shape lends itself to formal landscape design, and espec...

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Image: Photograph created by AWA Ferguson (Blacktav on en.wikipedia) edge trimmed | CC BY-SA 3.0

Florence Court: The Pleasure Garden and the Walled Garden

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0. Florence Court's grounds were extensively landscaped during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Pleasure Garden, with panoramic views of Benaughlin and Cuilcagh mountains, was landscaped in the mid-nineteenth century and features Victorian specimen trees and displays of ...

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Image: Stephen McKay | CC BY-SA 2.0

Florence Court: Wodehouse on the Hillside

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0. During the spring of 2012, the BBC filmed parts of its television adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse's Blandings stories at Florence Court. Most of the series was filmed at nearby Crom Castle, but Florence Court appeared in supporting scenes. The series, first broadcast on BBC One in ...

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Image: Gerd Eichmann | CC BY-SA 4.0