County floras captured between the leaves

ANOTHER LIFE:NOW THAT autumn seems bent on sliding seamlessly into spring, it can take half the winter for some plants to slow down. My morning trips to the raingauge wear a deepening trail in the grass. But most wayside plants, I am pleased to see, are still crumpling on seasonal cue, retiring to rest in root-buds, rhizomes, belly-button rosettes.

Everything gloriously blossoms again, however, in two new books among the Christmas offerings, both of them county floras with appeal and importance far beyond their borders. John Feehan’s The Wildflowers of Offaly (Offaly County Council, €40) and Tony O’Mahony’s Wildflowers of Cork City and County (Collins Press, €29.99) are weighty, handsome hardbacks, funded jointly by their local authorities and the Heritage Council – an uplifting enterprise, given the times.

Neither book should be confused with flower identification guides – in different ways, both are enriching, eager works of botany. One offers deep acquaintance with the flowers themselves, the other is more conventionally concerned with where they grow and how they’re faring.

John Feehan, UCD ecologist and writer, has his home in Birr, and lifelong devotion to his county’s great outdoors shines through his images (the wing petals of the early marsh orchid “are held at the angle of a hovering kestrel”). Much of his book – packed with fine photographs and illustrations – is all about looking (with a hand-lens, if necessary) at the inner world of flowers: the ingenious anatomy, architecture, engineering that give each plant its individual “personality” and serve its constant changes, from budburst to pollination to the ripening and launching of seeds.

Once, painting a vase of nasturtiums over a period of a day or two, I was quite disconccrted by their insistence on shuffling around with the light. “The life of a flower,” writes Feehan, “can be compared to the movement of a ballerina in slow, slow motion” and, like Darwin, he has clearly spent many hours, even days, observing some exquisite choreography.

“What happens next,” he writes, as Herb Robert ripens its seeds, “is well worth the patience required to observe it” – whereupon, slowly stretching five catapults, the plant sets about firing its progeny for six metres or more.

Such up-close-and-personal engagement with flowers is enriched from the studies of Darwin and other great botanists of the past. Some of them were prompted by the explorations of herbal medicine, and Feehan, like Tony O’Mahony, attends to those uses and traditions. Both authors describe many of the non-native flowers that have naturalised in Ireland – but it is O’Mahony who gets really upset about some of them. Montbretia, three-cornered garlic and the creeping pirri-pirri-bur have all, he says, made “massive inroads” on native vegetation, but his uttermost villain is the winter heliotrope, a Mediterranean native brought into Ireland in the mid-19th century to provide winter pollen and nectar for hive-bees. It is now, he reckons “the greatest single alien plant threat to wildlife habitats in Ireland”. Its smothering onward march, apparently, has been hastened by all the disturbed ground offered by the building boom and continuing surge of new roads.

Co Cork is still a stronghold of luscious natives like the large-flowered butterwort (pictured), Irish spurge, strawberry tree and Killarney fern, and the plant photographs by the author are mostly of rare or threatened species of the countryside. But perhaps the most intriguing of his pages are devoted to the wildflowers of Cork City itself, flourishing in limestone walls and quarries or the rotting timbers of its quays. No book could be better calculated to get city folk out for a walk, with fresh, inquiring eyes.

Tony O’Mahony is a self-taught botanist who has spent 40 years of indefatigable walking and searching across a huge study area. His dedication has been matched in the neighbouring county of Waterford by another remarkable, self-taught explorer, Paul Green, who has settled there after notable work in Britain. His Flora of County Waterford, published last year by the National Botanic Gardens, is hailed as a landmark in Irish botanical recording, and while still available in softback at €25 is now online at flora-waterford.biodiversityireland.ie. It gives the essentials of some 1,500 different plants and their habitats, and is full of species distribution maps – but no flower illustrations. Online, however, the habitats of Green’s favourite botanising walks – 33 of them, of great variety – are enticingly described and pictured.

Just over a century ago, the great Robert Lloyd Praeger finished botanising expeditions that took him some 5,000 miles around Ireland. His national flora seemed so thorough that it inhibited such intensive fieldwork for many decades after. The new county floras speak, in their very different ways, for a countryside still full of loving discovery.

Eye on nature

Walking my dogs on a track through woodland, I keep coming across what looks like regurgitated hawthorn berries on old logs and piles of leaves, not in pellets but like they were vomited. There are more each time I go out. Also, driving to Cork recently on the motorway, I counted the dead animals lining the solid, dividing wall: two hedgehogs, one fox, one cat, several crows, several unidentifiables and one seagull.Jane Harvey, Abbeyleix, Co Laois.

The substance in the woods sounds like a slime mould, perhaps Leocarpus fragilis, which grows in woods and was multiplying because the conditions were favourable.

What is the safe time for cutting hedges to avoid damage to nesting birds?

Marita Doherty, Blackrock, Co Dublin.

From September 1st to the end of February. It is an offence under the Wildlife Act to cut or interfere with hedges from March 1st to August 31st.

A flock of sparrows in my garden dived for the hedge when a sparrowhawk swept over them. It perched on a conifer nearby, watching the hedge for about 20 minutes. Suddenly a magpie dashed at it, put it to flight and took its place on the branch.

Tom Honey, Belfast.

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