Where are our licensed natives from?

I WAS at our local radio station last week, contributing to a programme on National Tree Week.

In the course of the programme, the subject of hedgerows came up.

This was quite logical because the bulk of our native trees, which are so valuable to wildlife, now grow in hedges rather than forests.

I became quite excited and made a passionate plea for the protection of hedgerows in the face of the juggernaut of development. I ended my rant by saying that you can’t conserve something like this unless you know the quality and quantity of the asset. We didn’t have the baseline data on hedgerows to allow us to start a policy of protecting them and this was a crying shame.

As I went out through the soundproof doors at the end of the broadcast, I was met by a smiling young man from Kildare County Council who handed me a newly published book entitled Co Kildare Hedgerow Survey Report.

The hole I’d dug for myself on air got a little deeper when I started to read the book. It was over 100 pages long, covered every aspect of the subject, made excellent recommendations and was a model of how these things should be done.

Then I discovered that similar reports existed for Longford, Laois, Offaly, East Galway, Roscommon and Westmeath. And there may be others that I haven’t heard about or that have not yet been published. Also, the Networks for Nature organisation has recently published a book on the national asset called ‘Irish Hedgerows’.

So, it looks as though things are changing. An aspect of our countryside that used to be characterised by neglect and ignorance is now getting the recognition it deserves. It’s nice to be able to write about environmental progress for a change.

About ten years ago, I was shown a planning permission issued by a Local Authority that stipulated that, because an old hedge was going to be destroyed, it had to be replaced with a hedge ‘composed of native species such as beech’. When the planning officer doesn’t know that beech is not a native species, you have a problem.

NOW THINGS should be rather different. But it would be wrong to think that all the problems have disappeared. One of them is hinted at in section 3.01 of the Recommendations in the Co Kildare report.

“A study should be conducted of nursery suppliers and garden centres to determine the availability of native planting stock (including provenance) for the range of hedgerow tree and shrub species recorded in the Co Kildare Hedgerow Survey …”

Provenance is the problem. Many of the more common native species can be bought in this country, but most of them are imported from abroad. This is not really the fault of the Irish nursery business. EU regulations insist that only trees grown from licensed seed can be sold. I am not aware of any stands of native trees in Ireland that have this licence, so, in order to sell legally, they are forced to import.

And provenance is important. I often quote the example of the oak trees I have grown on my own land. I collected the acorns myself, some locally in Kildare and some from the Killarney National Park in Kerry.

The Kerry trees break bud a week before the Kildare ones and often suffer from severe frost burn in mid-May. Your stock must be as local as possible.

There is also the fact that a good Irish hedgerow cannot, unfortunately, be created instantly. In fact, I reckon it takes at least a century for it to develop its full richness and variety. This is particularly true of minor plants like dog rose, honeysuckle, primrose, cuckoo pint, hart’s tongue and violet.

[e-mail]