Blooming with tropical splendour

“OH, I do like to be beside the seaside...” So went the Cockney music-hall song of the early 20th century.

It was the fashion for the British working-class folk (“working-class” was a term much used in that era) to spend a holiday week every summer at some Brighton, Bognor or Skegness resort and to “stroll upon the prom, prom, prom” as the song puts it.

Cordyline palms — also known as New Zealand cabbage palms — in seafront parks and gardens helped create the ambience of exotic foreign beaches in the days when only the very wealthy could afford to holiday overseas.

In the case of Torquay, where the palms were a feature of the promenade since the 1820s, they have been cut down. Apparently, muggers could hide in them. I find it hard to see how any but the very smallest of muggers — mini-muggers, perhaps — could conceal themselves in a cabbage palm, unless they climbed into the crown and leaped down upon their victims. It occurs to me that hotelier Basil Fawlty, of Fawlty Towers which was set in Torquay, might have had something to do with the decision.

We are blessed with a great number of these Cordyline australis palms in West Cork. They are numerous in Costa Courtmacsherry, as that resort was dubbed during the recent heatwave. At the moment, many are in glorious bloom, confections of millions of tiny flowers on thousands of slim flower spikes, the effect being that of a surreal pink mop-head mounted on the trunk. Some of the pink bracts are already turning white; these are the flowers which will, in time, change to berries; a single tree can produce a million seeds in a season.

In all, our cabbage palms (surely a most inappropriate name!) although aliens, are welcome additions to the environment. They give the illusion of tropicality — in West Cork’s temperate, Gulf Stream weather, they do not need to be wrapped up during winter, and thus persuade the visitor that this part of Ireland is mild, almost Mediterranean, a place where he might like to linger and spend his holiday bucks.

In summer, the flowers fill the ambient air with a heady fragrance, especially on sunny days. So, while the tree’s tousle-headed appearance attracts holidaymakers, the nectar from its flowers attracts insects of every kind and when the berries appear, birds gorge on them. What a useful tree!

In its native New Zealand, Cordyline australis provided the Maori people with food and medicine, with fibre for weaving textiles, for making ropes, fishing gear, baskets and roofing material. On South Island, where temperatures are similar to Ireland (or colder) it withstands frosts, and grows quickly. The most ancient known tree is 17 metres (56ft) high and close to 500 years old. Its circumference is 9m (30ft). Cordyline is, apparently, related to asparagus.

How wonderful it would be for West Cork if we could grow a Cordyline-sized asparagus!

Meanwhile, now, in late June, cliffs at the Old Head of Kinsale and elsewhere are veritable cities of birds, with high-rise sea-stacks and apartments on every level. I would urge readers to go and look asap, before the eggs are all hatched and the chicks reared, for it is a wildlife sight of awesome activity and beauty on our very doorstep.

Binoculars add exponentially to the attraction, bringing into view the intimate details of the nests (bare rocks with the eggs or chicks sitting naked upon them) and shutting off all distraction, so that one joins the lives of birds busily rearing their young 200 feet above the calm or turbulent sea.

Guillemots and razorbills nest on steep shale slopes, but their eggs, fat and heavy at one end and almost pointed at the other, spin but do not roll when they are disturbed, and so are safe. The parent birds fly back and forth as fast as swifts and are lost to view against the dark cliff faces. White, delicate kittiwakes and stout, white fulmar bill and coo like lovebirds on narrow shelves.

High above them, on the clifftop, a peregrine pair roost, satiated and basking in the evening sun until they feel hungry again and flash out and stoop at, perhaps, 100mph onto an unfortunate kittiwake and carry it back to the plucking post and share it.