Planting seeds of food and folklore

IT'S been a season of mellow fruitfulness, with juicy blackberries, especially, growing in profusion and tasting very good indeed.

People are reporting a better than usual crop of blackberries and are attributing the rich harvest to the fine summer, boosted by increased moisture in September. It has also been an excellent year for wild mushrooms and orchard apples are tasting well, too.

Berries of all kinds appear to be growing in favour with food lovers and food experts, not only for their taste but also for their health-giving properties.

Better again, in an era when people want to look young forever, we’re told some berries contain chemicals that slow down the ageing process — as well as enhancing immunity and giving protection against disease, including cancer and heart problems.

Increasingly, yoghurts and bottled water are berry-flavoured. Even people that never eat a berry from the bow, so to speak, are getting the benefits from a varied range of well-packaged products.

Many of us also now savour a daily helping of berries in some form, even if it’s from a plastic container. But there’s something special in the taste of a sweet blackberry which has been picked from a thorny bramble in a field or on the roadside. This year, too, home jam-makers have been busier than usual, ensuring their families will be able to taste blackberry during the long winter months.

There’s a lot more to plants than mere food, however. Plants are bound up with Irish folklore and are mentioned, for instance, in the medieval Brehon laws.

They have also had a religious significance, lasting to this day, with St Brigid’s crosses being made from rushes, for example. And look at all the humble shamrock has come to symbolise.

Herbal medicine has been around from time immemorial: fadó fadó in Ireland, the body was believed to be made up of 365 different parts, with a specified plant to cure the ailments of each part.

A delightful, thoroughly-researched book with fine illustrations has come to hand, detailing folk customs and beliefs surrounding Irish plants.

The blackberry has been considered a valuable food source since the earliest times, while also providing dyes for wickerwork and curing ailments such as diarrhoea and skin complaints.

In his book, Irish Wild Plants — Myths, Legends and Folklore, Niall Mac Coitir says there used to be a belief throughout the country that blackberries should not be eaten after the feast of Halloween (October 31), a practical reason being that the berries were rotting at this time.

In addition, as so often occurs in myths, fairies were also lurking in the background. A pooka was supposed to spit on the berries around Halloween, making them inedible. In other places, the pooka was supposed to urinate on the fruit.

There were also places, both in Ireland and England, where the pooka did the damage at Michaelmas (September 29), by which time the blackberries would also be over-ripe and decaying.

“Blackberries have been eaten as food since the earliest times, either eaten directly or made into jams and tarts,” writes Mac Coitir. “Blackberry seeds have been found in the stomach of a neolithic man dug up at Walton-on-the-Naze, in Essex.”

Rushes have also been part of life in Ireland, featuring in place names and defining areas such as Sliabh Luachra, the countryside which straddles the Cork/Kerry border.

Rushes were traditionally used for thatching and for spreading on floors to keep houses fresh.

As they grew near water and wet places, rushes also came to be associated with the purity and cleanliness of water and holy wells.

Meanwhile, the St Brigid’s cross, made of rushes, was once the most common type of cross in Ulster and Leinster particularly.

Ireland has a wealth of plants and Mac Coitir stresses the importance of preserving our landscape “whether it is by keeping old hedgerows or not draining that damp field down by the river”.

He says an all-out move to intensive farming would be especially harmful and welcomes the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme (REPS) that pays farmers to preserve old walls, hedgerows and meadows which shelter so many of our native plants.

However, making room for nature is not just a matter for farmers, he adds. Even people with a small patch of garden can leave space in odd corners to let things go to seed, or allow wild plants to grow.

“Nettles, for example, are host to the caterpillars of some of our loveliest butterflies,” he explains.

* Irish Wild Plants — Myths, Legends and Folklore, by Niall Mac Coitir, Collins Press. €25