Scents of flowering wild plants fill air

WILD plants have flowered extravagantly this summer.

Perhaps the successive hard winter was the cause. Blue islands of tufted vetch colonise the verges, stonecrop is like pink icing on the tops of old walls and the downy heads of meadowsweet bow over the country lanes like wisps of candy-floss on stems a metre tall.

The meadowsweet flowerets fill the air with perfume. The warmer the day, the more their heavy scent pervades the air. It is almost soporific. Walking the back-roads on warm afternoons one could be tempted to lie back against the ditch like an old-fashioned tramp and snooze an hour away.

Meadowsweet is a plant of damp ground but as it is only rarely that the Irish ground entirely dries out, it thrives everywhere on this island. In Irish it is called Airgead luachara which my memory, aided by my old school foclóir (1B Secondary, CBS Thurles), tells me means Money-rush or, perhaps, Gold-rush, this presumably alluding to its colour.

In English, it was once called ‘mead-sweet’ because the doughty Angles and Saxons used it to sweeten their favourite tipple, the regular imbibing of which was much safer than drinking the water, at least in London after the Romans left.

To divert from flowers for a minute, it is said that the reason Mongol peoples in general become more quickly inebriated than Europeans is because we have a long history of drinking mead or beer. This was small beer, or wallop, watered-down to, perhaps, 2% alcohol and not to be mistaken for codswallop, a fizzy drink marketed by a Mr Codd which, in fact, had no wallop at all and was, thus, a ‘cod’.

Codd came up with a method of keeping the fizz in his drink by putting a marble in the neck of the bottle. This, when forced upward against a rubber washer by the fizz in the concoction, created an airtight seal. The initial problem for Codd was that the marble had to have a greater diameter than the bottle mouth, and so how would he get it in? And how could the liquid be poured and the bottle resealed? A glass-blower called Rylands solved both of Codd’s problem. It would of course have been impossible for Rylands to blow tens of thousands of Codd’s bottles so he developed an industrial manufacturing process. The bottles were much copied. They are now valuable as curiosities but are in scarce supply due to small boys smashing them to get at the marbles. I remember seeing such bottles in an old shed as a child.

As to small beer, while Shakespeare’s Falstaff, as we know, favoured sack in large quantities for recreational purposes, he no doubt quaffed a gallon or two of the amber liquid with breakfast, if only to quench the thirst from his surfeit of sack the night before.

Thin beer was drunk by Europeans for breakfast, lunch and dinner because the presence of the alcohol sterilised the water and made it safe to drink. The Eastern races, meanwhile, developed a tea-drinking culture in which the boiling of the water to achieve the infusion had the same effect.

Returning to the meadowsweet flowers, it is recorded that Good Queen Bess was very partial to their scent and her courtiers would spread them on their floors when honoured with a visit. One of my Thurles schoolmasters, a layman and staunch republican, rhymed “Queen Bess” with “Bad cess!” Cess was originally short for Assess, the name of a tax levied on the Irish to supply the Lord Deputy’s garrison with provisions at prices “assessed” by the government. Our response was to invent the phrase, “Bad cess to it!”, cess since becoming slang for luck.

I am sorry to see that this year the old meadow opposite our house is densely colonised by Buchalán buidhe (aka ragweed or ragwort) many of the yellow heads — soon to turn an ugly black —standing waist-high. If inadvertently cut and dried along with hay and fed to horses, this weed can kill the animals. Formerly, pulling buchaláns was an annual chore for farmers but clearing this field would be impossible for one man.

Our domestic fowl, the heron, comes and goes, absenting itself for twenty hours but regularly turning up for breakfast and, sometimes, for supper too. It is not everyday one may see a heron at such close quarters. Children are intrigued — and adults, too.