Life is bursting out in nests and flowerbeds
Like small buttercups, they shine as if varnished amongst their heart-shaped leaves.
For a fortnight or so, they have been flowering in the local woods, leggy stems lifting the flower heads over the ground ivy, but they were almost always half-closed, as is their habit when there is darkness, cloud or rain. However, this morning the sun was bright in a cloudless sky, and the celandine glittered like newly-minted sovereigns dropped on a bed of green.
The tide was far out in the bay, the wet mud flats bright as melted silver. Beyond the headland, the sea was blue as the Caribbean. I set off through the woods to see if the ravens were nesting. It was the kind of morning when one wished that all of those one loved could be there to share it. Such mornings might regularly come with the breakfast coffee in Spain or the Canaries, but in Ireland, this morning was outstanding for giving us the first dose of warm sunlight since the year began. Warm sun poured through the bare trees, and when it hit the ivy on the beeches, it shattered into little ingots of light.
Beneath the beeches, the white-flowered ransoms, also called wild garlic, filled the air with the aromas of a Spanish kitchen, but weren’t yet in bloom. Come late March, they and the bluebells would carpet every inch of woodland floor. However, already the wood anemones were out, delicate, soft-petalled flowers that, like the celandine, close when clouds pass over. Small mats were in bloom, pinkish-white amongst the shoots of bluebells and ransoms.
Out on the headlands, the sea was so bright under the sun that one had to slit one’s eyes to look at the horizons. And, as I walked the cliff path, it wasn’t long before I knew that the ravens were back again, despite the nesting disaster of last year.
Every February or March the ravens return to the same site on a vertical cliff face over the sea on west Cork’s Seven Heads. Last year, however, when the fledgling were reared to within a day or two of leaving the nest, some calamity occurred and, overnight, the nest was seen to be strewn with corpses, red flesh and torn feathers.
What happened is still discussed amongst friends who gather at a local pub. The nest happens to be very visible from a popular cliff-top walk, The Seven Heads Way, and so many of those who use the route know about it. The jury is still out; it is really impossible to know what happened.
As the days of February passed and there was no sign of the old nest being renewed, there was a fear that the site had been abandoned forever.
So, it was heartening to see, as I approached, a fine, glossy raven, with its big, black beak, standing on a fence post above the site, and then, rounding the bend in the path, to see a bird — presumably the female — on the nest on the cliff below. When she flew off, close scrutiny with high-powered binoculars discovered no eggs, but the nest is ready, lined with horsehair white, black and roan, harvested from the barbed wire fences of the fields above where horses graze.
I see blackbirds and mistle thrushes on the orange-bark myrtle in our front garden. The myrtles in the woods below the house look exotic in the slanting sun. Tall and slim, the russet trunks mottled with white patches where bark has peeled off and topped with a shining, evergreen crown, they look lovely in any light.
Native in South America, myrtles grow wild in Cork and Kerry. The Linnaean name Myrtus apiculata indicate a connection with bees (as in ‘apiculture’) and the luxuriant white, cup-shaped flowers are rich in nectar. The black fruit is edible, the size and taste of a large haw, and used medicinally by native people in Chile and Argentina.
A cultivar featuring gold-variegated leaves was developed from a tree in Valentia Island. Known as Glanleam Gold Orange-bark Myrtle, it is sold in garden centres worldwide.
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