Its wings clipped but beautiful still ...

LAST week, through the windows of a TransPennine train in the north of England, I saw sheep grazing the hill slopes.

The following day, disconcertingly, I saw a woolly, black-faced sheep in formaldehyde in a glass case in Leeds Metropolitan Museum. It was the work of Damien Hirst, whose first name disconcerts me too, because when I was young I never met another Damien. It seemed there were no Damiens in Ireland then, and when I went to see a black-and-white film of Father Damien, the Belgian priest of Molokai, I may have been the only Damien in the cinema.

In spite of the shared name, I did not have the vocation to live with the lepers on that remote Hawaiian island, although I was quite holy. My father had named me Damien having read Robert Louis Stevenson’s book, Father Damien. I met my first Damien when I was boarding at Blackrock College, Dublin, and didn’t meet another until I was in Ibiza at the age of 21. In 1978, the movie, Damien: Omen 11 hit the cinemas and now there are Damiens everywhere, including Damiens who install stuffed sheep in tanks of formaldehyde.

Hirst is an ‘environmental vandal’ in creating his art. He made a stunning mandala of butterfly wings, a circular plaque two metres in diameter, with the wings in concentric circles — thousands of wings — shimmering under clear varnish. It is a beautiful piece and one hopes the butterflies were humanely euthanised before being pinned and plucked in the cause of art.

Butterflies have a short season; their wings become tattered and faded and they die under a bush while, I suppose, Hirst has preserved their beauty for posterity. The preservation depends on the quality of the varnish, that it doesn’t flake or yellow and distort the brilliant hues. It is showing mild signs of wear, unfortunately, and one wonders what David Beckham, the footballer, is doing to conserve his £250,000 investment in one of Hirst’s butterfly extravaganzas.

All along the roads around Manchester and Leeds, where I enjoyed a weekend of reunion with my children and their spouses and my grandchildren — and ate a paella cooked by my eldest son on concentric gas rings in a pan as big as the mandala, and, when it was ready, almost as colourful — the dreaded, if lovely, Himalayan balsam grew. Great swathes of it flourished on the verges, tall and pink among the pink rosebay willowherb, a native species and also rampant, but not spreading at the same rate as the alien from the foothills of Northern India, which has become a pest and a plague second only to Japanese knotweed.

Himalayan balsam, like knotweed, was first brought to the UK as a garden plant, an exotic beauty from the Far East. Knotweed, too, is now in full flower. I wonder if the scientists are satisfied that the bug they think to be knotweed-specific — it will not attack any other plant — can be released without a threat to indigenous species. Caution is the byword; but there is cause for urgency as the knotweed spreads.

Happily, I do not often see Himalayan balsam here, although a patch on the road between Clonakilty and Skibbereen in west Cork flourishes annually. It looks lovely but should be eradicated. It subsumes all our native species, and many of these have specific, symbiotic insects that pollinate them, while forming part of the countryside food chain. An acre of knotweed or balsam will have fewer creatures than an acre of species-rich Irish road verge or meadow.

Quite rightly, my Latin of two weeks ago has been taken to task. I should never have tried to translate “I fear small boys bearing fish,” extrapolated from Virgil’s famous line “I fear Greeks bearing gifts.”

I made a hash of it, of course. I had intended to warn readers that my translation was unreliable and more bog Latin than book Latin — very appropriate for a nature writer, I suppose. I got 17% in Latin in my Leaving Cert. I should leave Latin alone.