Garden of sunny delights comes to life

NOT TO belabour the pun but it can be said, in this summer of 2008, that the elements are an element of every conversation.

The effect on nature is often a subject I hear discussed by people concerned at the changes they see on their walks and in their gardens. They tell me there are no midges, bumblebees or butterflies about.

For what it’s worth, I can tell them that one day last week, when the sun shone for six hours non-stop, I saw 10 butterflies and a few bees. There were two peacocks, two red admirals and three silver washed fritillaries; all came and went to the buddleia bush in our garden. Later, I saw two speckled woods and a cabbage white. How extraordinary!

We have moths, also. Yes, since summer began, I must have counted at least four that arrived through open windows at night. But, of course, we can’t leave windows open at night as we did in other summers — there are the nocturnal downpours and sometimes goose-pimple temperatures to contend it. We don’t light a fire, but I have seen smoke curling from the chimneys of at least two summer homes in this temperate village on the Gulf Stream coast.

I’ve also seen two six spot burnets (black wings, with six red spots) and a single cinnabar — also black and red, and producing the black-and-amber caterpillars that dine on common ragwort, which is thriving in all its poisonous glory this year. There are no Cinnabar caterpillars to eat it and in any case, in recent years, some farmers don’t seem to need to use or care for the land as they did before, and so it has proliferated exponentially.

It is unusual to see more fritillaries than the other varieties from which, conspicuously absent, is the usually abundant tortoiseshell.

The fritillaries are big, orange butterflies, the females slight paler than the males and, sometimes, a lovely shade of olive green. They feed on thistle heads, hemp-agrimony and bramble flowers, and lay their eggs in niches in bark. The caterpillars feed on dog-violets.

Hemp-agrimony is the tall, many-headed mauve flower now in bloom in hedges. The heads, formed in dense clusters, will soon turn to feathery seed parachutes, called pappuses and float away on the wind.

The leaves look like marijuana (as depicted on T-shirts and cigarette lighters) and so it was given the ‘hemp’ tag, although it is no relation. It was named for Mithradates, an ancient, learned and brave king of Asia Minor, who discovered its medicinal uses and having been defeated by Pompey, the Roman general, committed suicide in 63BC.

Montbretia, the flower that brightens up the roadsides in long swathes of brilliant orange seems, like the unpleasant ragwort, to be having a good year. It is hard to beat a bunch of montbretia for sheer vibrant colour when it stands in a vase in sunlight. When the flowers fall, the stamens are like the wisps of saffron that sell for many times their weight in gold and are used to colour the rice in paellas.

This afternoon, in a rare few minutes of sun, I was looking with mighty admiration upon such a vase of these wayside flowers when, just outside the window, on the balcony rail, an equally dramatic sight suddenly appeared, a cock bullfinch, resplendent with his pink, puffed-out breast and black shiny cap as he alighted and picked some morsel off the rail.

It may have been a caterpillar; bullfinches are fruit, seed and bud-eaters but feed caterpillars to their young, perhaps a late clutch because of the weather. How it spotted the creature was, itself, amazing. Oh, for the eyes of a bird!

When a bird blinks, it can still see. Vision is never lost, even for a split second, except when it’s asleep. The eyesight of buzzards, big hawks, that prey on very small creatures — they are becoming more common in Ireland — is eight times keener than ours.

If our eyes were as large in our heads as are starlings, they would be the size of sliothars. A golden eagle’s eye is larger than a man’s, while an ostrich’s is five times bigger.