Booking a week with nature to nurture

The cliffs of the Seven Heads in west Cork are garnished with confections of sea pinks in full bloom, blankets of yellow kidney vetch and mantles of golden bird’s-foot trefoil.

I cannot remember seeing the cliff tops so lavishly endowed.

This week, with family visiting, we will walk them and, weather permitting, will take ourselves west to the islands of Bantry Bay. A ferry to Whiddy and a cable car to Dursey should make a welcome change for children and grandchildren who lead urban lives, albeit familiarity with Ireland and La Gomera have imbued in them a grá for nature.

I will take my camera to the islands, and photograph any especially beautiful or unusual plants that I see. It’s a harmless hobby but, with a book like Sherkin Island Marine Station’s latest publication, The Wild Plants of Bere, Whiddy, Dursey and other islands in Bantry Bay (€19.99 from booksellers), I can pretend I am some sort of scientist as I compare my photos with the book’s illustrations and information on the plants. To learn which plants exist on which islands is interesting, and it tells us where to find them. Perhaps one day, I’ll find I have a picture of a plant the Marine Station team of botanists have missed! Meanwhile, I always learn something, and as one sorely in need of further education, photographing and identifying plants fills the bill. The book also has dramatic photographs of the islands, with outline walking maps.

We should have had Ireland’s Wild Orchids, a new and useful book from The Collins Press with us when we were walking in The Burren in Clare in late May.

I thought the orchids we saw were the most common of the 24 Burren varieties. Leafing through this book — text by Brendan Sayers of the National Botanic Gardens and illustrations by Susan Sex, Royal Horticultural Society Gold Medal winner — I realise that one species may not have been so common at all. It wasn’t anything as exotic as O’Kelly’s Spotted Orchid, flowering in July and August, but was subtly ‘different’, perhaps an Early Marsh Orchid pulchella rather than a Western March Orchid past its “sell-by”. Not that wild orchid populations could survive picking for sale. However, taking Burren orchids to market was once the case.

In the mid-1930’s, an enterprising Burren farmer and amateur botanist, Patrick B (for Bernard) O’Kelly, composed an annual catalogue, offering for sale an extraordinary variety of wild plants, clumps of spring gentians at six bob a dozen, bee orchids at three for half a crown. Only on the banks of raths protected by pisoges did many wild plants escape his harvesting. This was the same O’Kelly who first brought to botanical light O’Kelly’s Spotted Orchid, an exotic that flowers in July and August. Mr Sayers tells us that when promoting them to clients, Mr Kelly delighted, in describing them as “gems of the first water”.

In Attitudes to Nature in Ireland, an essay discussing reasons behind the decimation of landscape, flora and fauna in Ireland (Nature in Ireland — a scientific and cultural History, Lilliput Press, 2000), John Feehan, the author, referring to Mr Kelly’s entrepreneurial efforts, said: “But what is almost as extraordinary as his enterprise is the mildness of rebuke that greeted his depredations.” Nature conservation in Ireland was not popular, not even “Irish” perhaps; in those early days of the Irish state, tennis wasn’t Irish, golf wasn’t Irish, classical music wasn’t Irish, and neither was looking after nature. Bodies like Save the Bogs, Friends of The Irish Environment, The Native Woodland Trust and other concerned groups have slowed the depredations but nature and natural beauty is still abused.

Returning to the theme of flowers, my brother tells me that the peach and nectarine blossom that painted the Andalusian plains pinkish white in early spring yielded a good crop.

No hailstorms, a phenomenon of April and May, arrived to pockmark the delicate skins of the peaches (nectarines are tougher) and make them unmarketable.

In his modest orchards outside Seville, 80,000 kg of peaches were harvested and 105,000 kilos of nectarines. Other farmers were not so lucky; an extensive apricot farm yielded no saleable fruit, while oranges fetched no more that 6 cents a kilo.