You are what you eat!

Untamed Gardener

The drive from Kilnaleck to Ballinamore via Killeshandra is especially beautiful today. Swaths of fireweed and meadowsweet interspersed with ragwort line the roadsides. It’s a medley of magenta, cream and garish yellow. If we can call spring yellow, then the colour of summertime has to be pink. What makes them especially lovely is the dreaminess endorsed by heat of the day and the backdrop of pale green fields, sometimes with silage strips just like a John Hinde postcard. Unlike the Irish landscape painter Paul Henry, who painted vast altocumulus cloud filled skies and open scenes of the west of Ireland, some of them where fields were divided with small stone walls.

They are nothing like our modern-day field systems, where everything is swiftly catered for and by machine.

From a distance, I appreciate the industrious look of patchwork fields, the result of design, effort and production.

Soon, with the stroke of a brush, light shades of green and gold will pale to white as lime is applied to counteract acidification of the soil. Soils in Ireland suffer from the high rainfall which reduces the pH, meaning plants can no longer take up nutrients and worm activity stops.

The art of farming the landscape remind me of gardening, albeit on a much larger scale.

My romantic notions of pastural bliss are challenged when, for a treat, as it isn’t possible at other times, I walk the fields after a silage cut. It is all very quiet there, except for the long verges where life still thrives at the edge. I pass swiftly by a swarm of bees that warn me away loudly.

Actually, they are oblivious to my presence, it’s the power of the sound that has me skipping away.

I am on the lookout for a particular caterpillar and its food plant, but there’s no signs of them. I hope I am just too early, and they are not out in full yet rather than for any other reason.

The wet summer of 2024 was not great weather for butterflies and moths. The other day, on an evening walk, in Ballyconnell, I found a few on a site of rocky rubble, a cinnabar moth larva , munching away, nestled on a ragwort in a disused place in the middle of the town. Places that are unattractive to humans are often safe havens for wildlife. I had hoped it would be a hotbed of biodiversity, but there were not as many larva as I would like to see. They are a striking orange and black marvel of nature. I love hunting for them every year. The adults are sometimes confused with the innocuous, five and six spotted burnet moths who feed on leguminous species, such as common bird’s-foot-trefoil and pupate on grass stems and other plants.

Their caterpillars are completely different, from dark olive to yellow and black.

A nocturnal species that is often seen by day, the cinnabar moth is a black and red beauty. It’s colours warn predators to 'back off or die!' Birds are clever enough to avoid eating the toxic dish of cyanide, a poison derived from the food plant, the inglorious buachalán. This is another plant associated with the wee folk who have been known to use the plant as a steed; “don’t call it a weed though weed it may be, tis the horse of the fairies buachalán buidhe”, is a Sligo saying.

Also known as the herb of Saint James, the patron saint of horses. Maybe there is something in it?

Although horses would be wise not to eat it, and usually they do not.

Nor do any livestock, not by choice, and will happily graze around it, most of the time. It is classed as a noxious weed and is the duty of farmers to eradicate it on their grazing land.

But as far as I know, it’s allowed in other areas as it is a high value biodiversity plant.

As well as a substantial amount of folklore, the plant has been used medicinally in the past for jaundice, inflammation, coughs and colds. I think myself that it might kill or cure you though, so my advice is stick to the lemon and honey or what have you.