As summer gloomily succeeded Britain’s spring, my garden was overrun with weeds. They are not just plants which I personally consider to be in the wrong place. By weeds I mean weeds, plants which compete with other plants for soil, water and light by infesting their roots and overpowering them: couch grass, dreaded horsetail, docks, bindweed and ground elder.
Last year the garden was clean, but this year it is full of them. The persistent rain has revitalised old seeds and bits of dormant root. To gain impetus for an assault on them, I went to the other end of the spectrum, to a region where flowers are wild, not weedy.
My destination was the Burren in western Ireland. For the past 40 years I have longed to see its stony landscape. Its wild flowers are famous, culminating in its blue gentians, which flower with a view of the Atlantic Ocean, and multiple types of orchid, from O’Kelly’s to the enigmatic Western Marsh. They go back thousands of years and owe nothing to wilding or a policy of no-mow Maying. They are unmown all year, as a mower would break on the accompanying natural rock.
With gleaming white limestone in my mind’s eye, I began on the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway. Their flora relates to the Burren’s, but their stone does not glisten. It is as grey as granite and wonderfully grim, the background for several years in the life of the Irish playwright JM Synge. On the edge of Inis Mór I looked out to Inis Meáin, where he wrote his first plays and compiled a book, later published, on the people of the three Aran Islands. He never mentioned their wildflowers.
As I walked near the cliffs’ edge and looked out to sea towards America, I enjoyed what Synge well called “the intense insular clearness one only sees in Ireland”. I was standing among pink sea thrift and white Silene uniflora. I was a playboy of the western world indeed, like the title character in Synge’s celebrated play, who hid on Inis Meáin, waiting to flee to America.
Before reaching the cliffs I had seen the rare Babington’s Leek, whose green stems, 3 feet high, curve over curiously into buds of pale purple flowers. The cracks in the limestone at ground level are known as grikes, pockets of soil, often acid, in which plants root and flower at a fraction of their normal size. Honeysuckle, hardly a foot long, crawls over the outcrops.
In Oxford I grow tall bushes of Rhamnus cathartica, the best plant for attracting brimstone butterflies. In the Burren their gnarled roots hug the rocks and their stems are nearly flat. In Oxford I use Rosa pimpinellifolia, the Burnet rose, as a prickly hedge, 4ft high, to keep straying college inmates off the grass. On the Aran Islands the Burnet roses are only 6 inches high, flowering nonetheless.
Synge repeated many local tales about the fairies on the Aran Islands. He never considered my deduction, that the fairies shrink the local wild flowers in their washing machines.
Thanks to Robert Wilson-Wright, my sharp-eyed botanical companion, I had seen rich purple orchids in some of the grikes, but their correct name puzzled us. On the mainland, while driving to the Burren, we stopped to ring that Irish resource, an informed Catholic priest. In Kildare, Jackie O’Connell, now in his eighties, is famous for having wilded his churchyard in order to foster flowers among the gravestones. He has an expert knowledge of Ireland’s orchids, about 30 varieties in all.
Over the phone he wavered between Dactylorhiza occidentalis and kerryensis as the Aran ones we had found, but then he consulted others and rang back to inform us that they are probably one and the same. In Britain I have never rung Anglican Canterbury from a car. I doubt if I would receive botanical guidance if I did.
The Burren derives its name from boireann, an Irish word for a rocky outcrop. Whole hills rise up in grey limestone layers, like grey hills in parts of Turkey. At ground level, flat slabs, like cowpats of stone, flow irregularly over the soil. The limestone absorbs heat in the summer and radiates it in winter, another bonus for its plants.
Here too the fairies shrink the shrubby yellow potentillas and reduce a rare sun rose, a subspecies of Helianthemum oelandicum, to a few inches. They also shrink the golden rod whose kin I grow at the back of a border. They even stunt the grey-green sorbus trees to a height of only 4ft.
Yet more orchids proliferate here, from pale pink Heath Spotted orchids to bee orchids with distinctive markings. By the roadside I found a hairy- leaved variant of the arabis, or rock cress, which I grow in the Cotswolds in raised beds. Over the stone walls, tufts of pink-flowered thyme, Thymus praecox, remain compact, never spreading into the carpets they lay on my home soil. Deep magenta bloody cranesbill, Geranium sanguineum, is ubiquitous, far more richly coloured than those I have thrown out of my garden as purple failures. In crevices, the white-flowered little Irish eyebright was new to me and a surprise.
It has not been the best year for flowers on the Burren’s blue gentians, but in one site we found a dozen star-shaped beauties, gleaming like my prized Gentiana vernas at home. To please them I mix their soil with rotted cowpats, collected in old shopping bags. In the Burren cows graze in winter and leave the real thing beside the gentians as a convenient mulch. When in the past an EU directive limited the grazing of cows in open country in winter, the Burren’s gentians lost their manure. Hazel bushes and brambles encroached, no longer contained by cattle’s munching.
A dominant flower made my heart leap, the white-flowered Mountain Avens, or Dryas octopetala, which I have seen growing on the northernmost Arctic tundra, where it spreads by the square mile. The Burren fairies have shrunk it too, whereas in gardens it makes huge mats of green with leaves like a little oak’s.
It is a clue to the Burren flora’s uniqueness. Almost all of its individual wild flowers grow elsewhere, but their conjunction is unique. In less than a square yard we revelled in a scented white Mediterranean orchid, in starry blue gentians best known in meadows in the Alps and in the white dryas whose fluffy seed heads cover the Arctic tundra. Since the last Ice Age these plants have lingered in groups in the Burren, whereas they have been dispersed elsewhere between continents and habitats.
After seeing the Burren in 1651, one of Oliver Cromwell’s generals, Edmund Ludlow, reminisced that it had “not enough water to drown a man, wood to hang one, nor earth enough to bury one”. It was yet another Cromwellian mistake about Ireland. The Burren has little watery lochs, or turloughs, in which we were shown some hyper-rare mossy algae. It has wood from hazels and shrunken hawthorns. In the grikes the rich soil encourages plants to root, sometimes to a great depth.
I have come home to my weakly rooted weeds, ever more determined to root them out. If the horsetail reappears, I will pray to Ireland’s little people to rinse it with fairy liquid and shrink it to insignificance in their washing machines by night.
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