Sweet summer delights in the garden

THE OTHER day I was trimming back a hedge that had grown unruly and was creating too much shade over part of my garden. It was a boundary hedge of native trees and plants and I would guess it was at least a couple of hundred years old so I was trying to treat it with some respect.

I worked my way along slowly, using hand tools, mainly a bushman saw and a pair of secateurs. I was making no attempt to create a laid hedge, although these have come back into fashion in recent years. I don’t see the point in them. The amount of labour required is not justified in this day and age when hedges can easily be made stock proof with some form of wire. And personally I think laid hedges are rather ugly and unnatural.

I find this work oddly satisfying — provided, of course, you protect yourself properly from briars and thorns. It’s not a job for which you wear a short-sleeved shirt. My hedge included blackthorn and whitethorn, lots of brambles and quite a few wild roses — all prickly stuff.

The larger prunings were trimmed and set aside to season for the fire. The smaller stuff was returned to the hedge bottom where it would provide protection from the wind, cover for wildlife and, when it eventually rotted, nutrients for the hedgerow plants.

At one point I had the secateurs poised to clip through a vine that I supposed was a strand of ivy but it didn’t look right so I stopped. The stem was very smooth and a pale grey-brown, not at all like ivy. I followed it up with my eyes and spotted the clusters of pointed oval leaves of a rather pale green. This was honeysuckle.

I was glad I had spotted this in time and spared it from the clippers because wild honeysuckle, or woodbine, is one of my favourite plants.

There are about a 180 different species of wild honeysuckle in the world plus a large number of cultivated varieties. But there is only one species that’s native to Ireland and it’s a fairly common woodland and hedgerow plant on lime-rich soils.

It’s a tree climber but, unlike ivy, it doesn’t stick itself to the tree using modified aerial roots, it just twines through the branches. Using this apparently inefficient method it can reach astonishing heights. In Saint John’s Wood in Co. Roscommon I have seen it blooming in the canopy, at least 20 metres above the ground.

IRISH wild honeysuckle is deciduous, though other species are evergreen. Because of this and because it’s originally a forest plant it has to start work early in the year and it’s one of the first of our native deciduous plants to break bud, usually coming into leaf in late February.

This is a heartening sight in late winter but the true glory of the honeysuckle is the flowers it produces in mid summer. They are long trumpets of white and gold with a drop of sweet nectar at the bottom and a heady perfume.

The nectar is there to attract large hawk moths which pollinate the flowers. They have a very long tongue that they keep coiled up like a watch spring in their mouths. They can extend this to reach all the way down the trumpet to get at the nectar.

The perfume of honeysuckle is so heady and sensuous that in Victorian times the flowers were banned from houses with adolescent boys in them because they were thought to provoke erotic dreams. But the real purpose of the scent is to attract the moths, which is why honeysuckle is more fragrant at night than during the day.

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