Time to go native with wildflowers and trees

EACH time I travel out around the bay, there's a new house a-building, another corner widened, a further stretch of brand new stone wall at the verge. From Louisburgh to Westport, it's getting not suburban, that's too glib to fit, but tamed and "gracious", you could say, each new picture window with its view. Croagh Patrick, heaped up above scallops of dark purple scree, becomes more and more a piece of wildness to be regarded through glass.

The Irish countryside has often been such a mess at its human margins, not natural so much as decrepit, that the new order of bungalows and gardens, county council landscapings and tidy-town flower beds can actually seem a change for the better: more of a piece with the geometry of fields that keep green as lawns all year.

Such "developed" landscape, common to much of western Europe, seems certain to expand enormously through the next few years, as roads are widened, margins made more presentable to tourists, and the surroundings of factories, schools and housing estates improved to quite new standards. Most of what actually grows in this landscape will be tightly controlled and botanically quite alien to the unruly native stuff that flourished there before.

With this in mind, I've been exploring what is certainly the drabbest of the seed catalogues that have come my way this Christmas: not a colour picture in sight, all black-and-white print. Yet the Irish wildflower Catalogue & Manual emanating from Sandro Cafolla's "Design by Nature" enterprise at Crettyard in Carlow is a deeply interesting and exciting document.

It's some 15 years since Sandro first appeared on the ecological scene, a passionate young freelance concerned about conserving Ireland's wildflowers and their genetic purity. At a time when British companies were extending to Ireland their new, green market for wildflower seed, he began growing his own native plants and selling meadow sods and seed mixtures.

Some 200 wildflower meadows, on golf courses, at local authority roadsides and in landscaped gardens, have now been established with his flora, and thousands of gardeners have bought Irish Wildflower seed in packets and on greeting cards at garden centres.

If the new catalogue - his third can sometimes need attentive reading, this reflects the extraordinary complexity and subtlety of what Sandro is trying to do. Instead of perfecting a few, fairly simple and standardised "wild flower mixtures", most of which would be strewn to the wind in completely unsuitable sites, he tries to match the right mix of plant species to his customers' specific habitats.

From a couple of hundred different wildflowers and grasses (black meddick, wood plantain, marsh lousewort suggest the remarkable range), he will create the basic biodiversity of "ecotypes" such as ancient woodland or hedgerow, raised bog or cornfield. A similar alchemy goes into meadow or pasture mixes to suit particular soils and situations. He will even supply a blend for school gardens that blooms in term-time, not the summer holidays.

But no comfort awaits a developer who tries to recruit Design by Nature to some piece of ecological sleight-of-hand. "We retain the right not to supply seed to projects who claim that in damaging a wild Hydra, the flora can be made good with our mixtures."

The catalogue offers a step-by-step manual on establishing and husbanding a wildflower meadow to the point where it will sustain itself on Just one mowing a year. An early surprise is to realise that a fertile soil may actually be a difficult one to start with, demanding regular mowing and special "nurse" crops to lock up the nitrogen and bring fertility down to more natural levels.

Thus, far from being an easy, slapdash way of filling an idle piece of ground, creating a successful wildlife meadow on any scale needs considerable planning, analysis and patience. The result can be, not alone beautiful, but a new genetic refuge for Ireland's wild flora, constantly under pressure from loss of habitat and replacement by exotic flora.

The need to conserve the native flora, rather than import seeds and plants from other countries, is a central theme of Our Trees, a guide to growing Northern Ireland's native trees from seed and cuttings. It is compiled by Dinah Browne and published by Conservation Volunteers Northern Ireland, at 159 Ravenhill Road, Belfast. Thanks to some serious commercial and government sponsorship, it positively glows with rich design and photography.

Jo Whatmough of the National Trust makes the case for local loyalty in the choice of trees - not only have our own species adapted to their habitats over thousands of years, but they relate to a whole network of snails, insects, lichens, birds and fungi and the community of plants that grow in their shade.

Like Sandro Cafolla, Ms Whatmough thinks it does matter that the hawthorn or oak we plant should come from Irish sources, rather than from seed collected, say, in Central Europe. She goes further, to argue that an Ant rim hawthorn should be planted in Ant rim and a Fermanagh bird-cherry in Fermanagh - both have evolved to different local climates, have slight genetic differences and are tuned to specific local nuances of adaptation in the flora and wildlife around them.

All the trees and shrubs dealt with in the guide are, of course, common to the whole of Ireland (though some, like the Irish species of hornbeam, are of local distribution, north and south). But the practical detail on the actual growing of trees from seed does, if I dare say so, have something of distinctive Ulster thoroughness about it.