Passages of wayside beauty

The roads of Connemara are launched into one of the several purple passages of summer. As rhododendron fades to pink, and loosestrife lurks in the damper ditches, waiting for July, spires of spotted foxglove bells sway at the wayside in a sumptuous verticality somewhat at odds with the landscape.

What is a tall "woodland" plant doing in such purple platoons in the middle of bare and rockstrewn bog and its maze of waterlily lakes (a flower that keeps its head down, if ever there was one)? True, foxgloves enjoy their light in a woodland clearing, and they prosper in acid soil, but the high bog roads of Connemara are as far as could be from anyone's idea of a bee-loud glade.

A closer look at where they're growing offers one clue. Many of the richest stands of foxglove have their roots in well-drained soil banked up at the edge of newlywidened roads - the "disturbed soil" of botany books. Each plant of Digitalis purpurea produces an average of 750,000 seeds, and even if only a few per cent keep their viability, an impressive number must pile up in the top litter of the earth. These seeds, unusually, need exposure to light to germinate (tobacco, some primulas and lettuces are other examples of this). New drifts of foxgloves among the clear-felled stumps of conifer forests were triggered into growth by this eerie capacity to measure lumens.

The western forests are modern, and carved from blanket bog. Could there be a link with the flora of Connemara's ancient woodlands? Seeds of Arctic lupins, after all, have survived 6,000 years or more (but in permafrost refrigeration). The idea that the foxgloves have been stirred into germination from prebog, Bronze Age soil is an attractive one. Think of the poppies, long vanished from most of our farmland, springing up in scarlet drifts along the verges of new dual carriageways: even cornflowers, once thought extinct in Ireland, have popped up in bloom on the central reservations.

But for pre-bog foxgloves it's been too long: the old seeds would be fossils. What we see, at most, is foxglove generations handed on from fragments of old oakwoods (such as Derryclare, in Connemara's Inagh Valley, wrapped for so long in State conifers) and in soil trucked from one site to another to make new verges on wider roads across the bog.

There is always a feeling of mystery to the massing of woodland flowers in open country where the old, broadleaf forest has gone for thousands of years. Here at Thallabawn, grassy ditches utterly without shade are smothered with primroses in spring. Across at the Great Saltee, off the Wexford coast, a treeless, birdwatchers' island not farmed in 50 years, field after field is densely carpeted with bluebells - sheets of colour in the early summer.

Humidity has much to do with all this. Bluebells, primroses, foxgloves are all naturally quite happy in the open in the moist air of the west, both here and in Britain. Perhaps their woodland habitats are simply another way of keeping cool.

The "improvement" of Connacht's narrow and twisty western roads leaves me with very mixed feelings. I am glad of the faster and more comfortable journeys, yet realise how they are sealing me off more and more from the landscape.

The other morning I walked for a mile or two on the narrow open road that winds through the bogs and mountains at Doolough Pass. This is where sheep, by long custom, lie down for the night on the warm, dry tarmacadam, and shelter in the lee of the road walls along Killary Harbour.

But the toll of incidental casualties may be getting too high. As I walked, a car appeared in the distance and advanced in spasms, a few hundred metres at a time. At each pause, the driver let out a great shout that sent the sheep scurrying up the mountain, safely away from the road. They knew his voice, in what is obviously, through the tourist season, a regular morning chore.

Further on, in the Maam Valley on the far side of Leenane, the road is being not only widened but fenced with sheep-wire, tight to the tarmacadam, mile after mile. A big part of the valley's charm used to be the road's intimate, if tortuous, connection with the landscape, so that rock, bog and water became part of one's personal journey. Now, the roadside curtain of posts and wire pushes the landscape away, imprisoning the traveller in the trivial act of passage.

Here and there along the "unimproved" sections of the road are passages of wayside beauty so utterly distinctive that one has to fear for their survival: a stretch of shaded, mossy stone wall hung densely with soft emerald ferns; a succession of bushes of the wild dog rose, of that fresh and delicate pink that has never made it into gardens; a ditch full of royal fern, sturdy and golden, and heading for the Red Data Book of endangerment the moment it ceases to be "frequent in most of the west".

I sometimes think what would be lost if our own stone-walled tendril of road, petering out at the strand at the foot of the mountain, was ever widened to take the modern tour-bus. A wall of ferns here, a hedge of honeysuckle there, a stretch of primrose ditch beyond; nothing rare would go, just marvellous details on the way to the post-office.

They have taken half a century - perhaps twice that - to mature, to fill out into their natural space, equal as local heritage to the wayside shrine, the holy well, the ancient gable. Does anyone imagine they would ever be replaced?