Coole Park is a nature reserve with a walled garden and extensive woodland, including the "Seven Woods" made famous by Irish poet W B Yeats. In the walled garden, there is a beech tree known as the "Autograph Tree" engraved with the initials of many famous writers and poets including George Bernard Shaw, Edward Martyn and Yeats. Yeats was a friend of Lady Augusta Gregory who lived at Coole Park and he wrote "The Wild Swans at Coole Park" while staying with her:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.