Gorse’s golden rule no longer holds

ON bank-holiday Monday, a local songwriter/musician phoned me to say that the click-click of the gorse pods popping in the heat were like maracas in a salsa band, and that kissing was finally out of season in west Cork.

Michael O’Brien was referring to the effect of the unusually sunny weather and to an old saying I’d retailed in my book, A Place Near Heaven, which noted that “kissing’s out of season when gorse is out of bloom”. Country people know that there is always a sprig of gorse in flower somewhere, in all months of the year, so there is no danger of a closed season on canoodling.

A characteristic of French gorse is that, while it has a main flowering season in May, individual bushes flower all year. Indeed, I’ve noticed on winter walks when we’re caught on windswept headlands with stair rods of rain bucketing down, that there’s always the odd, optimistic bottlebrush of yellow gorse to light the dismal ditches before we abandon hope and race for the pub.