Sir, - Mr John Ducie (August 6th) implies that the management of Booterstown marsh is devoted entirely to the needs of one species, puccinellia fasciculata. (Mind the spelling - or did your correspondent get it wrong?)
I quote from the authoritative Grasses by C. E. Huggard under the heading Borrer's Salt-MarchGrass: "The species of Puccinellia have been included in the genera Festuca, Glyceria, and Poa. From the first they may be distinguished by the blunt thin-margined broader tips of the lemmas; from the third by the lemmas being rounded (not keeled) on the back; and from Glyceria, in which they have been usually classified in British Floras, by the free margins of the leaf-seaths, the smooth lemmas, and the minute hilum of the grain."
But so what and who cares? Ought we allow ourselves to be blackmailed by a few "conservationists" who seek to be paid to tell us what we must be worried about? Let us indeed be concerned about the spring gentian and the bloody cranesbill, and by all means about the corncrake, which gave solace and comfort to an occasionally sleepless youth in the 1940s. But an obscure grass which no normal person would recognise anyway?
A sense of proportion, there is such a thing as that, you know. - Yours, etc., Niall O Carroll,
Dalkey, Co Dublin.