Furze by any other name would smell as sweet

THE Cork and Kerry mountains were golden with gorse when we drove west last weekend, not Irish dwarf gorse, which displays its glory in September, but French gorse, the tall fellow which Goldsmith described, in The Deserted Village, as “blossom’d furze unprofitably gay ... ”.

Unprofitable, in terms of its commercial value (it wasn’t always so) but profitable to the eye, and to the image of Ireland, adorning, as it does in its season so many of our natural vistas, postcards and tourist brochures. It would be a duller world but for the gorse flowering “unprofitably gay”.

An old adage has it that somewhere there is always a sprig of gorse in flower: “Kissing is out of season when gorse is out of bloom”. And since love, like hope, “springs eternal in the human breast”, kissing is unlikely to ever stop, or gorse to flower.