ANOTHER LIFE:MICHAEL LONGLEY can make half a poem out of the names of flowers. In The Ice Cream Man, he tempers and deepens a tale of atrocity with five long lines of them, a bitter-sweet incantation from "thyme" to "bog pimpernel". One looks into the words as into the faces of the flowers, their names suddenly so telling and intimate.
Once, in a film about Michael, we focused closely on the tip of his fountain-pen, inscribing on to lined paper the name “agrimony”, another word to say aloud. It caught me out in not recalling what the flower looked like and having to go to a book, so that now, when I admire it, the syllables trip through my mind in a steady caress of blue ink.
Agrimony is past its best along the banks of the boreen to the sea, its tight yellow spires flayed by salty, unseasonable winds. The gales have bleached the lady’s bedstraw and withered the south-west side of the heather bells. Wrested from their summer poise, the careful sharing of light, the wayside plants are now an autumnal tangle: meadowsweet, loosestrife, bracken, with amethyst glints of vetch; briars reaching out to trip and fuchsia bells askew.
It’s in August that I rehearse the parade of umbelliferae (now, it seems, apiaceae, but let that pass), those look-alike lacy parasols of flowers that used to confuse me so. Each cluster of florets is an umbel, the whole umbrella another, and from the finely embroidered pignuts of spring (“Here we go gathering nuts in May”) to the last bare umbrella ribs of angelica stripped of seeds, there’s a slowly-learned seasonal sequence.
In flower, as now, angelica is one of my favourites. Its umbels, distinctly domed and dusted with pink, are so fractally lovely that one has to excuse their attraction for bluebottles and other glossy flesh-flies, browsing for nectar beside platoons of ruddy soldier beetles. It grows along wet ditches and streams, its fleshy stems reminding me that its garden version, Angelica archangelica, long escaped to grow wild by the River Nore, used to be candied for cake decoration. I can just summon up its greenly scented stickiness from weddings as a child.
Neither plant is, I hope, to be confused with another riverside umbellifer, giant hogweed (yes, there are ugly words for flowers). As Heracleum mantegazzianum, this statuesque parsnip from the Caucasus has ridged, purple-blotched stems that can reach up to six metres tall and thrilled the makers of big waterside gardens from early Victorian times onwards. As Richard Mabey remarks in his Flora Britannica, "It is hard to believe that gardeners had remained immune to the sap for more than a century".
The plant’s modern recognition as a public health hazard (the saps’s phototoxic chemicals make human skin blister in bright sunlight) emerged only with its invasive spread along rivers in both islands and casualties among children cutting stems for blowpipes and telescopes – this, of course, in the days when they played out of doors and had real, rather then virtual, adventures.
Giant hogweed is now officially another “invasive alien”, but one notoriously difficult to eradicate. As she describes on her new wildflower website, www.wildflowersofireland.net, Zoe Devlin photographed it on the Shanganagh River in 1980 and again in 2005. It’s just one of the hundreds of plants she has photographed in 35 years of country walks and climbing over fences. Now they are assembled in a personal record in which science is enriched with discriminating snippets from literature, botanical history and UCD’s national folklore collection.
This is the second outstanding Irish wildflower website to flow from the enthusiasm of a dedicated woman, using expert advice when required.
The first, launched a year or so back, is www.irishwildflowers.ie, is the creation of Jenny Seawright in Co Cork (Zoe Devlin is in Co Wexford). Both sites have similarities in ease of selection of species, links to distribution maps, lists of what’s flowering this month, and so on.
I tried each of them on ragwort, the yellow, sometimes toxic, pasture and wayside weed that people rush to complain about this month. Both sites are an education in the multiple species, sub-species and hybrids of a plant most people think of in the singular (there’s common, hoary, marsh, Oxford rayless, silver and everything in between).
Jenny Seawright’s site has the edge botanically, with better pictorial coverage of ragwort’s variability; Zoe Devlin’s is more engaging and personal, with a greater breadth of context, including a brew-up of ragwort poultice culled from the folklore collection. I think we’re doing well to have two such committed and complementary guides to the wildflowers of this island.
My drawing is of ragwort with its well-known familiar, the cinnabar moth. Don’t ask which sort of ragwort.
