Taking stock in a 5,000 mile walk on the wild side

ANOTHER LIFE:MORE THAN a century ago the great Irish field botanist Robert Lloyd Praeger took out maps of Ireland and railway timetables to plan five years of weekend walking, away from his job in the National Library: "An early train to a chosen place, then 50 miles or so across country with a halt for the night in the middle, and a late train back to Dublin. That could be done on a toothbrush and a collar, and the plants collected kept fresh (with care) till one got home."

His 50 miles covered every kind of terrain, often in the worst of weather. There were plenty of plant records from the scenic rim of the island, but far fewer from the central plain, where even Praeger could despair of monotonous tracts of limestone pasture closely grazed by sheep. After 5,000 miles (8,000km) of tramping he had completed the data for his Irish Topographical Botany(1901), the first thorough stocktaking of the island's wild flowers.

Declan Doogue, a Dublin schoolteacher, has been learning about plants for 40 years as leader of the outings of Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club (dnfc.net). Since 1886 this club, of which Praeger was an early member, has been a wellspring of amateur interest in Ireland’s natural world. It has taken the lead, for example, in providing a national butterfly website, butterflyireland.com.

In writing his new book, The Wild Flowers of Ireland,with photographs by Carsten Krieger (Gill Macmillan, €29.99), Doogue evokes his own progress from the simple love of flowers and learning their names to a greater understanding of why they grow where they do, and in what company. Geology and land history, niches of climate and moisture all help to set a plant into its habitat and community.

Doogue is not the first to offer such insights into the island’s floral landscape. But his sense of engagement with Ireland’s field botany, in the age of computer and hand-held GPS, helps to make his book, as I am quoted as saying on the jacket, the most important of its kind in a century.

Perhaps calculatedly, he leaves the internationally famous wild garden of the Burren to a final few pages, setting off instead with “Weeds in Flower Beds” and “Urban Waste Ground”. His own searches for plants began with excitement over rarities at Glenasmole Waterworks, and while so much of Ireland’s countryside is taken over by green deserts of silage grass, the churchyards, canals and roadsides – even the bases of city walls nitrogenised by piddling dogs – have become refuges for our floristic heritage.

Doogue chooses a mere 300 of the 1,000-odd flowers that grow in Ireland – the most characteristic of their habitats – and this is not a field guide but a large-format volume that is also meant to make the most of Krieger’s ravishing photographs. The many close-up images have a stunning beauty that brings the botanist’s hand-lens perspective into the digital age.

A second book on Irish wild flowers in the autumn-for- Christmas season goes back to Praeger's era for another plant enthusiast. Even in the 19th century The Wild Garden, published in 1870, made William Robinson famous and helped to revolutionise gardening in both Ireland and Britain. It became, indeed, a classic, but one that is rarely owned or read. Now its original text is reprinted by Collins Press at €29.99, with commentary and fine photographs by Charles Nelson.

The main thrust of The Wild Gardenwas that the Victorian fashion for flower beds overstuffed with garish annuals was absurdly costly and wasteful not only of plants but also of gardening's creative energy. Along with hardy exotic perennials that could be naturalised, especially in Ireland's soft climate, Robinson turned to the wild flowers and wild shrubs of these islands for the creation of gardens based on the way plants grow together in nature.

How far this led to wholesale appropriation of wild plants is unclear (the autumn-flowering crocus of my drawing, once locally common in the Nore Valley, was last heard of in one damp meadow in Limerick). But Charles Nelson is scrupulous in his alternative offerings of modern, cultivated varieties of plants.

William Robinson pops up again in the cultural explorations of a third new flower book, Richard Mabey's simply titled Weeds(Profile Books, £15.99). In this, Robinson's admiration of the "mystery and indefiniteness" of natural vegetation is set against John Ruskin's disdain for vulgar weeds and a general denial to wild plants of any intrinsic beauty.

As Britain’s leading nature writer, Mabey has no problem with seeing weeds as “part of the heritage or legacy of a place, an ancestral presence, a time-biding genetic bank” (even if, when necessary, he pulls them up). But, as he points out, in urging the import and naturalisation of plants from across the globe, Robinson was well aware that many would be invasive. “Japanese knotweeds,” he records, “were barely grown in Britain before Robinson popularised them.”

Eye on nature

In my rural garden small pale-grey pigeons are busy collecting twigs, taking them to a large, dense golden conifer tree. Surely it is the wrong time of the year for nest-building?

Nuala Henry, Coachford, Co Cork

The birds are collared doves and they are building platforms in the trees on which to rest in the winter.

Having observed a spider which has a web outside one of our windows, I have noticed that he/she is on its own. Are spiders solitary creatures?

John Lynch, Phibsborough, Dublin 7

Our spiders are solitary and only females of the web-spinning variety make the webs that we notice. Young male spiders spin tiny webs to transfer their sperm to their palps before they go off to find a female.

On a very wet day outside the Natural History Museum in Dublin I saw a seagull paddling the ground with its feet. Intermittently it would stop, listen and start again, eventually pulling an earthworm out of the ground.

Rachel Stapleton, Wellington,

New Zealand

The vibration of paddling, like the pattering of rain, causes the worm to move, so the gull locates it. That gull, or another, has been paddling there for the past 10 years.

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