Plants that nourished our ancestors go under the microscope

THE FIRST SEEDLINGS on my workroom window sill looked a bit pale at first in their yogurt pots, but they have grown greener with every sunny day. They’re cabbage – very ordinary, but then not so, for Hispi is a supercharged hybrid that will deliver small, sweet and tender cabbages by the “hungry gap” of late spring.

Like many vegetable gardeners, I am torn between the reliable triumphs of the hybridising plant breeders and the simpler plants my father grew on his wartime allotment. Their seed-making, left to random insect pollination, survives in the “heirloom” varieties rescued by virtuous amateur networks from destruction by EU bureaucrats and global corporations.

Whatever is saved from the gardens of the past, the wild plants eaten by our hunter- gatherer ancestors and early farmers remain largely mysterious. In the hungry gap of a Mesolithic or Neolithic spring, when the nuts and berries were gone and the grain was running low, one big food source was underground and starch-rich tubers, corms, roots and rhizomes – but these left little trace for archaeologists to name.

Now, however, a team led by James Eogan, an archaeologist with the National Roads Authority, is taking a microscope to the cracks and crevices of ancient tools, pottery and even Neolithic teeth to find surviving starch molecules and identify their plant origins.

This is more than mere curiosity. Our ancestors lived close to nature, and many of the plants that nourished them are wild relatives of the crops we use today. This fits into wider initiatives to seek out and safeguard the plant genes we may still need in a world of changing climate and new hazards to human food and health.

Spurred on by Ireland’s commitments under the global Convention on Biological Diversity, the Department of Agriculture has funded a new national website of crop wild relatives. It was developed for the National Biodiversity Data Centre at Waterford by Dr Darach Lupton and launched on the centre’s website, biodiversity ireland.com, earlier this month.

When amateur gardeners are offered such bewildering choice of food seeds it can be hard to credit the “increasing genetic uniformity of our global crop species”, as a Data Centre ecologist, Dr Una FitzPatrick, puts it, that makes wild genes still so important for future food security.

The new website describes 102 important crop wild relatives among Ireland’s native plants, with photographs and maps of their locations. A few are still grown for food – in my own garden there are horseradish and seakale, both now surviving in the wild on odd shingle banks around the coast. Others are obvious originals: wild carrot, wild cabbage, wild turnip, wild oats.

But who has heard of “gold-of-pleasure” (Camelina sativa), weed of waste ground, uncommonly full of omega-3 fatty acids? Or knew that garden rocket and sunflowers have established themselves in the wild?

The crop wild relatives website is the latest online resource offered by the National Biodiversity Data Centre. It follows an interactive atlas of freshwater fish in Irish lakes, a collaborative venture with Inland Fisheries and the Irish Char Conservation Group that offers the whereabouts of 23 species, not forgetting the stone loach or the nine-spined stickleback, in no fewer than 956 lakes.

Launched in 2007 on the initiative of the Heritage Council and funded by the Department of the Environment, the Data Centre was a long-overdue development in conservation of Ireland’s natural world. It brought together 50 existing but scattered databases, many hidden away in museums and archives, and has amassed and sorted more than 1.5 million records of more than 10,000 species.

To the casual political eye an inventory of Irish wildlife could seem a reasonably finite task, a job undertaken largely to satisfy the scientists or the EU and now mostly finished – even, perhaps, a candidate, in these financial times, for some sort of pause. The Data Centre is operated for the Heritage Council by Compass Informatics, whose high-tech skills have helped to make attractively accessible data-gathering and interactive mapping.

But under the centre’s director, Dr Liam Lysaght, and its widely based management committee, Ireland’s dealings with nature have been given important new tools and energies. At one level its work is essential to planning and land use, to tracking environmental change, to monitoring wildlife loss and inroads by invasive species. At another, in partnership with a raft of wildlife NGOs, it is making observation and record-gathering a popular engagement with nature, infusing new understanding into recreation and life.

There are still some big gaps in the centre’s knowledge (of the island’s fungi, as one example), and its fledgling database of whales, dolphins and seals begins the oceanic task of mapping marine biodiversity. Some in a new government might think that nature can wait, and the swingeing cuts in the Heritage Council’s funding have not augured well. But Ireland has made nature wait long enough already.

Eye on nature

While surfing on the north Mayo coast I now see more otters than seals. I am regularly accompanied by an otter. The very harsh weather did not deter them, so their fur coat must be mighty stuff.

– David, Celine and Pearl Sands, Ballina

Otters have no fat layer under the skin and rely for insulation on an outer layer of guard hairs up to four centimetres long, and an extremely dense mat of underfur, about a centimetre thick, which is virtually impenetrable.

Recently I watched a golden eagle cruising in Letterkenny, and on a crab apple tree a flock of five exotic-looking waxwings and two jewel-like goldfinches feeding on the frost-softened fruit.

– Guy Stephenson, Letterkenny, Co Donegal

I saw a large flock of waxwings, about 30-50 birds, in the car park at Kingswood Heights. A bird sale was going on. Would this have attracted them?

– Frank Maunsell, Kingswood, Dublin

No. They were searching for berries or fruit.

We saw quite a few mandarin ducks in Carysfort Park recently. Are they scarce?

– Charles Mollan, Blackrock, Co Dublin

A feral population, escaped from breeders, is becoming established in ponds and parks.

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