Gazing at hedgerows a much under-rated summer activity

On these midsummer days of this (mostly) lovely midsummer weather, there’s so much to look at when one goes walking that it’s almost impossible to get any walking done.

Not meaningful walking anyway. By ‘meaningful’, I mean the kind of walking that keeps the body trim, the heart regular and the mind serene.

Getting involved with some plant or creature every hundred metres or so has a sort of contradictory effect.

The mind is active but the body less than it should be if the object is ‘exercise’ per se.

Hedgerow gazing is addictive: once one gets started spotting ‘things’ in the bushes, it’s nigh impossible to stop fixing on anything that’s interesting or unfamiliar or just plain beautiful.

As we know, on an Irish spring, summer or autumn country walk, such phenomena are encountered everywhere one looks. And, for the specialist, they’re there in winter, too.

I was fascinated last week by the bloom mats of white stonecrop now capping old stones walls. Some books note that they are most common by the sea and this is, indeed, true of the most extravagant local displays; they colonise the wall skirting Courtmacsherry Bay opposite historic Timoleague Abbey.

The flowers grow just a few inches tall, the fat waters-storing leaves are green becoming pink, becoming red.

The occurrence of white stonecrop is of interest to the National Biodiversity Data Centre (records.biodiversityireland.ie) which asks for locations of its occurrence to be reported.

By genus, it’s a sedum. It fares well in the roughest soil and survives where there’s too much sun or too little water for other plants. In the past, it was harvested for pickle- making and is probably the ‘house leeks’ documented in Culpeper’s Herbal, published 1653, the bible of 17th century medics administering herbal cures — as most did then, and which are now returned to favour.

Stonecrop species have been used as roofing for centuries in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Forming dense mats and needing no attention, they provide insulation against cold and heat, absorb rainwater and sound, and offer habitat to wildlife. ‘Green roofing’ is becoming popular in Europe and America.

Besides the flora and fauna of “the straggling fence that skirts the way” (the “blossomed furze unprofitably gay” has died back, but will flower again: gorse blooms, seemingly sporadically, at all seasons) the skies also offer nature that uplifts the heart: the house martins, swallows and swifts of urban settings.

In Clonakilty, Co Cork, sitting outside the pub, The Fiddler’s Green, I watched the swifts that nest in nearby roofs shoot past me and climb the sky and dive and skim the house tops. It was great to see them.

Up to recently, there was a colony in the heart of town, and on dull, midge-ity days, squadrons would rocket down the main street screaming in excitement like children let out of school.

Unhappily, their nesting niches were lost during roof repairs and they abandoned the site.

Nowadays, custom-built swift boxes are available, hi tech to attract low tech (although, who can describe a creature as ‘low tech’, which, at night, flies to 3,000m and adjusts to changing air currents while sleeping; that covers 24,000km on migration; that mates on the wing and comes to earth only to nest?)

Also to be celebrated in this world so threatened by extinctions: a fox on a West Cork road and a stoat on the verge, both alive, not roadkills; the bats in our front yard, come back after two years absence; tidings of “loads of hedgehogs” on a new, upmarket housing estate above our home; a long-eared owl nesting so close to a friend’s house that the screeching of the owlets keeps her awake at night.

When I say ‘not roadkills’, it is in contrast to the toll my son tells me he has lately seen outside his town in Bohemia in the southern Czech Republic.

It included a wild boar, a pine marten, two hares and a late-model car written-off after collision with a large deer. It’s tragic, of course.

However, it does, at least, indicate that the vast forests of central Europe are still stocked with large mammals as well as small, and maybe even wolves and bears.

Meanwhile, on our roadsides, the orange flowers of montbretia are breaking out like bush fires along the verges, and frothy meadowsweet is nodding over quiet lanes.

In the garden, purple verbena is in flower but no butterflies yet come to it.

Soon, more migrants will arrive to join the painted ladys, and our Irish overwintering species will wake and fly.