Celebrating a floriferous, floribundance of wildflower

ANOTHER LIFE

THIS WARM AND showery summer continues its wildflower festival: flowerful, floriferous, floribundant, take your choice. My celebration of a flush of greater butterfly orchids brought a note of confirmation from Brendan Sayers, the Botanic Gardens' magairlín - "the best year of seeing them in all the years of travelling around". And then, on the way for the Sunday papers, a different splash of colour along the road: not purple loose-strife, orange montbretia or garish yellow ragwort, but lovely, clear rose-carmine blossom in a tall thicket all to itself.

The bank was shaped a year or so ago in widening the road, from peaty gley dug up from the ditch behind. Here, too, ran a river of the bright new flowers. A spray of them teased me all the way home, not least with a memory of a Greenland valley in July, its wet gravel blazing with drifts of - ah yes, willowherb.

The willowherbs are a big family worldwide, and this was the great hairy one, Epilobium hirsutum, named for the generous size of its flowers and the merest fuzz of hair on its stems. In the recent, mammoth tome, New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora, the great willowherb is missing from much of the west coast and our corner in particular, but it grows well in Ireland's eastern counties and a botanist friend found it straight away on Pollardstown Fen. As an original Mediterranean native, its spread through western Europe probably began with Roman chariots. So has it been travelling with the traffic, like so many of our plants? And was it the bank-building digger that dredged it into life?

Last September, I exclaimed at the appearance of Himalayan balsam - an invasive alien, among many, but pink and exotic as a jungle orchid - on the verge beneath the fuchsia hedge outside our gate. Balsam has spread by spraying seed from explosive pods; the willowherbs by feathery white-plumed seeds and then the networks of underground rhizomes that (like the Japanese knotweed) consolidate its thickets.

In eastern Ireland, the rosebay willowherb (Epilobium angustifolium, with unbranched stems) has consolidated its spread.

Once a rare native found on rocky mountainsides, its accidental introductions from Britain have set up dense stands, initially along roads, railway sidings and city waste sites and then more widely (it was there for my friend on Pollardstown Fen, along with the droopy-budded, mini-flowered Epilobium palustre, yet another of Ireland's dozen native or imported willowherb species).

The rosebay willowherb (Epilobium angustifolium) is widely known as "fireweed" from its rapid colonisation of bare ground caused by forest fires - a habit so spectactular in Yukon that in 2001 it was made the province's official flower. In Britain, it sprang up on the bomb-sites of London after the blitz. Indeed, in his fine book Plant and Planet, Anthony Huxley suggested that willowherb "extended along the cuttings made for the new railways [in Britain] and, a little later, followed the first motor cars along the roads because their drivers made fires when they picnicked". He had also heard of willowherb's appearance "on burnt sites in the Himalayas where it had not been seen in living memory."

The apparent need of some plants to germinate in bare, scorched earth (caused naturally, in fires started by lightning strikes) serves their survival in conifer forests, but willowherb clearly loves broken ground of any sort, whether glacial rubble in Greenland or a new roadside mud-bank in Mayo.

And it's not alone in that. Road-widening in Connemara produced sumptuous banks of flowering foxgloves from, one could presume, long-buried seed. The plants are famous for springing up in spectacular abundance in woodland clearings and recently felled forestry plantations, their seeds having somehow measured the new intensity of light. But foxgloves are also remarkably resilient and persistent (their height record in these islands is held by plants growing at 880m on Kerry's Mount Brandon), and produce lots of very long-lived seed - up to 750,000 from a single plant.

The total stored in cultivated land has been estimated at up to a billion seeds per hectare, which makes the earth-churning operations of the current National Roads Programme a potent stirrer of life in the soil. Great flushes of poppies and ox-eye daisies have been among the more acceptable consequences, along with occasional appearances of near-extinct species such as cornflower.

The mix of wildflowers that might ultimately re-emerge we are unlikely to discover, since the NRA has potent guidelines for the early suppression of militant spear thistles, raging ragweed and horrid, slow-rusting docks, all subject to public paranoia and the workings of the Noxious Weeds Act, 1936. The great hairy willowherb, I'm glad to say, will probably drift and creep on regardless.

EYE ON NATURE

House martins commonly make nests under house eaves in this area, but no such attempts have been made by them in any of the five houses in our development. Our builder says they only nest on houses with white fascias etc, and all the fascias and gutters here are black.

Sophia Leonard, Gorey, Co Wexford

A nearby source of wet mud is essential for nest-building martins, no more than 200m from the nest site. Otherwise the mud has dried before the bird can get it to the site. Both sexes build the nest and they need at least 1,000 mud pellets to finish it.

I hooked a 2lb trout on a wet fly while fishing at 11pm on the River Suir. A heron repeatedly tried to snatch the fish as I struggled to land it. A strange, indeed primitive happening. I was clearly interfering with his position in the food chain.

Liam O'Sullivan, Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary

I saw a stoat-like animal while walking St Kevin's Way in Wicklow, in an area of recently felled conifers, and it had a white body and light brown head. Is it unusual to have winter colours in July? Denis Costello, Naas, Co Kildare

Very strange as stoats only very occasionally turn white even in winter in Ireland.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo; e-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address