Keeping the balance of old and new

Another LifeIt is the leaves that tell a plant when to flower, measuring out the length of days to keep to a near-constant annual rhythm. But what decides the vigour of flowering? Whether it's the extra carbon dioxide in the air, or a benign aftermath of the warmest launch of spring in a century, the blossoms of the wayside are excelling themselves.

My morning march along the boreen finds drifts of meadow vetchling, lady's bedstraw, bird's-foot trefoil tumbling yellow down the bank; bridal wreaths of honeysuckle, meadowsweet and agrimony; spires of golden rod and vermilion-tipped slender St John's Wort (not the pacifying sort). Away from the boreen, down at the dunes, there is spiny sea holly in exquisite thickets, foliage and flower-heads tinted that special, electric blue.

Other flowers seem to relish obscurity. In forgotten fields, dark clumps of rushes are literally bristling with blossom; brown tufts of inflorescence readying their seeds for autumn gales. The rushes were swept away in great reclamations of marginal land and now, they are creeping back. When I think about the future of Connacht's farming, my crystal ball clouds over with their spiky shapes, along with bracken fronds, ragwort, and thistledown.

Away from the silage ranches, with their sheds of invisible beasts, how will the land really take to weekend farming? Shall we lurch from a reckless glut of sheep to token flocks, and from cattle cropping roadsides to a presence sensed mainly from the annual stink of slurry? As more and more land disappears under bungalows and conifers, will bracken, that noxious fern that nothing in nature eats, creep down from the hillsides to fill the fields between?

The Rural Environment Protection Scheme was designed to cure the ills of over-intensive farming and to conserve nature-friendly habitats. How will it cope with the ragged edge of neglect? In one striking instance, the abandonment of traditional husbandry could have dire ecological consequences. In the Burren, the winter grazing of the limestone uplands is what has kept the growth of hazel in check and the limestone open to its dazzling mix of flowering plants. As part-time farmers change their breeds of cattle and withdraw them to convenient housing in the valleys, the hazel and blackthorn are already beginning to smother the special plant communities of the hills.

The answer, as Brendan Dunford insists, has to lie in a special partnership of agriculture and ecology, as detailed on his website, www.burrenbeo.com.

What might happen elsewhere to abandoned farmland depends very much on its history, as well as soil and drainage. I know one big, rough field, unfenced, unimproved and virtually ungrazed for half a century, which remains a classic "wet meadow" of the west. It is where I look in June for the pink of ragged robin, and it sparkles now with orchids and golden bog asphodel among the wild and knee-high grasses. Only the occasional low willow hints at the kind of scrubland to come.

At any time, any stretch of natural vegetation is helping to create the conditions for its next stage towards a distant climax of forest. But human activity is almost bound to get in the way. Invasions of single species, such as bracken or the common rush, can be traced directly to human intervention on the land.

Neither plant, as it happens, is strictly a "weed". For real worries about those, one has to go back before the days of herbicides. A souvenir of the Vineys' attempts at self-sufficiency is a volume of advisory leaflets published by the Department of Agriculture of the Irish Free State.

"Weeds," one thundered, "are nothing less than robbers and intruders!" The chief offenders were ragwort, thistles and docks, against which cutting "early and often" was the main recommended defence. Under the Noxious Weeds Act of 1936, still in force, a seven-day ultimatum from an itinerant inspector ("the Thistle Man") could lead to a £20 fine.

Even today, with handy herbicides, ragwort has certainly not gone away: as we head into August, whole fields of buachalán present a defiant glare. In the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora, ragwort is present in virtually every square of both islands. It is a "notifiable" weed, but "widespread in grassland", says the Atlas, "and especially abundant in neglected, rabbit-infested or overgrazed pastures; it also grows on sand-dunes, in scrub, open woods, waste ground, road verges and waysides, and on rocks, screes and walls." On Mangerton, Co Kerry, you can find it at 670 metres, its coarse yellow daisies nodding in the wind.