Monday, October 01, 2007
THE other day I was driving slowly along a small country road when something caught my eye. There were large, bright yellow flowers growing in the verge that looked unfamiliar.
I wasn’t in a hurry so I parked and walked back for a closer look. My hunch was right. This was something exciting. Corn marigold is such a rare plant in Ireland that the last time I’d found it was at least 20 years ago. There it was, growing in a road verge in Co Kildare. And on the other side of the hedge was a large cereal field, in stubble. This was just the right habitat. Corn marigold was probably accidentally introduced to Ireland by Neolithic farmers 5,000 or 6,000 or years’ ago and we know from pollen records and archaeological excavations that it was a common weed in cereal crops up until the 20th century.
It’s a spectacular wild flower, but it’s unpopular with farmers and it declined rapidly with the introduction of modern weed-killers and with more efficient methods of separating weed seeds from seed grain. It would probably have become extinct, but it’s believed to have developed an immunity to some of the most frequently used herbicides.
I was excited and decided to look for more clumps of the plant. It was an astonishingly colourful road verge with ox-eye daisies, field poppies, bird’s foot trefoil and — at this stage my heart jumped — cornflower. A single bright blue flower in the grass.
It must be a garden escape. I looked around. There were no gardens, just rolling acres of stubble and hedgerows. Anyway, the flower was smaller than a garden cornflower, about the size of a one euro coin.
But wild cornflower was declared extinct in Ireland in the 1980s. Then a small population was rediscovered on the Aran Islands and afterwards a few specimens found in Co Wicklow. Efforts were made to save it but there were problems with genetic contamination from cultivated varieties.
Who should I contact? Probably the local wildlife ranger and the botanical recorder for the county. Did I have the phone numbers? It took about 10 minutes for the penny to drop. I was about 20m further down the road verge when I came across a late-flowering specimen of corncockle. This beautiful pink wild flower is definitely extinct in Ireland. What I was looking at was impossible.
My colourful verge must have originated in an imported packet of wildflower seeds.
These seeds are available in garden centres and on the internet and are intended to be used by people who want to create wild flower meadow areas in their gardens. But I’ve done a bit of research and apparently some county councils are buying them in bulk and using them to brighten up their road verges. A botanist friend who lives in the west offered to show me kilometres of rare and extinct plants beside roads in Co Sligo.
This is a well-meaning policy. It makes the verges attractive and is also intended to increase bio-diversity. But I have some reservations about the widespread use of imported wild flower seeds in the open countryside. Tinkering with nature can be a dangerous business.
But thinking about it a little more I wonder if I’m being over conservative and if my real objection to the practice is that it can make an eejit out of an amateur botanist like myself.
dick.warner@examiner.ie
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