We don’t own the planet, we share it

Damien Enright reminds us of our duty to nature.

THERE are still a few bluebells in our wilderness, well shaded by metre-tall docks and thistles as big as bushes. The flowers are darker blue than those which grew in the woods nearby.

Day to-day as April ended and May came in, we saw the bluebell heads like pixels growing denser until at last they saturated the ground with a deep, unbroken blue. Robert Frost memorably wrote about stopping one winter evening to see “the woods fill up with snow”. On those late spring evenings, you could, if you had the patience, watch the Irish woods fill up with blue.