Another life: Right through the winter the odd primrose shone beneath the hawthorn, making me wonder what sort of show they'd put on when the right time came.
I needn't have worried: the blossom is right up there with Donne's "terrestrial galaxie", and the sight of a bumblebee sharing a clump with a peacock butterfly put a proper seal on the spring.
If some of our garden primroses have outsize flowers, or hoist them up in clusters at the top of a stem, the cause is not hard to find. The scene beneath our young oaks is one of frank miscegenation, as garden polyanthuses planted there years ago cross back and forth with wild primrose; even, indeed, with cowslips brought in for simple mischief. A sweet mélange of spring colour offers vivid variations on the original polyanthus seed-packet, together with the unnaturally stately primroses and outrageous cowslips edged in crimson and purple.
None of this, I suppose, would greatly have surprised Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish pioneer of putting some order on nature. It's the 300th anniversary of his birthday this year, celebrated by a grateful world of science. It was Linnaeus who brought sex into botany, sorting plants by the arrangement of male stamens and female pistils ("loathsome harlotry" as one critic wrote). While that did not endure, his groupings of living organisms by levels of similarity (genera, orders, classes, kingdoms) has largely stuck and, above all, species are still defined by a pair of Latin names, even in the era of molecular biology and DNA sequencing.
As for my hybridising primulas, they belong to a genus (fundamentally similar group) with around 400 species, found on nearly every continent and from Greenland to the south of South America, greatly varied in shape and colour (including rose, lavender, crimson and purple-blue). Common to them all is a basal rosette of strongly-veined leaves for guiding raindrops to the roots and five-petalled flowers of particular shape clustered in umbels or heads on a common stem.
Coining "primula" from the Latin word for "first", Linnaeus gave the name Primula vulgaris to the common primrose and Primula veris to the cowslip (primrose flowers do, in fact, have a common stem like the cowslip, but it's tucked right down at the base of the leaves: take a look!). The polyanthus was an early garden hybrid, bred from the cowslip and coloured primroses from abroad.
In Linnaeus's age of exploration, plants and animals were referred to by long and cumbersome descriptions in Latin. What he devised was the binomial system - just two words for each species. The first was the genus, or group, the organism belonged to; the second, the "specific epithet" describing one species and no other. This gave science a precise international language that ignored the myriad names of national cultures. What in Irish was "lus mór", in German "fingerhut", in French "pour prée", in English "foxglove", became Digitalis purpurea. Most second words in plant names are descriptive and pretty guessable from the Latin, even for those who, like me, missed it in school. The colours can be easy, as in purpurea for purple or cardinalis for red, and terms such as rotundifolius or foetidus are not all that challenging. But as the world generally loses touch with Latin, the "epithet" in a species name can become quite inscrutable to the non-scientist.
It may commemorate the scientist who identified the species, with an "i" on the end of the name to make it Latinate. It may say something about where an animal lives on the planet (lapponicus, americanus, maritimus), which is obvious. It may describe some key anatomical feature that doesn't even match the common name: what bird books in English call the "pink-footed goose" is Anser brachyrynchus, the goose with a short beak. Or it may even borrow from another language, so that the cod, Gadus morhua, steals from the French morue of Quebec. Some can rank almost as in-jokes within scientific disciplines.
Since Linnaeus refined his Systema Naturae in the mid-1700s with plant and animal specimens from all over the world, some 1.5 million names have been added to the planet's known species, and some 25,000 new ones are proposed every year. They are vetted by peer groups, published in science journals and fed into networks of computers. They are the product of taxonomy, the science of classification, traditionally tied to close study and comparison of specimens and now sometimes hurried along by DNA barcodes and allied molecular mysteries.
Meanwhile, I watch for whoever may tear the flowers off my primroses in the early morning to get at the juice in their nectaries: last spring, they littered the path. Charles Darwin blamed his greenfinches; I've got an eye on the blackbirds. They're called Turdus merula, two Roman names for the blackbird, when Latin is what Romans spoke.
Eye on nature
In the shallow water around the lake here in north Westmeath, I was puzzled to find frogspawn in a lake's shallows that was considerably larger than usual, the individual eggs being about four times the size of normal frogspawn, but not so regular in size, and with few black nuclei.
Bridget Taylor, Collinstown, Co Westmeath
The large frogspawn could have been diseased or damaged in some way.
On the night of March 23rd I thought I heard wild geese flying over the house. Is it possible the geese would fly in the darkness?
Martin Gordon, Ballybofey, Co Donegal
Wild geese often fly at night, especially on migration.
I saw five ravens on Killiney Hill, swooping out along the bay. They changed leader all the time, chatting to each other. What were they doing?
Kerry Pocock, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin
They could have been displaying to pair off, or just having fun.
