INSIGHT / 09
Plastic Blackbird catches Plastic Worm:
bringing the National Landscape Strategy down to earth?
I
n 1964 when I decided to study horticulture at University College Dublin, I had a dream of a career linked to gardens of verdant lawns, flowers, rose gardens, kitchen gardens overflowing with ripe fruit and leafy vegetables, butterflies flitting through sunny glades, birds singing and nesting in the trees, ladybirds sunning themselves on warm stone walls, bumblebees amplified in Canterberry Bells, all ultimately dependent on rich loamy organic soil full of worms and other beneficial creatures. I was also aware of the darker side of this pastoral vision lurking behind every leaf: sucking aphids (green, black and wooly), munching caterpillars, blights, mildews, leaf spots, rusts and viruses and those aggressive weeds. But fear eased as I was reassured by our wise college lecturers in the Albert College that thanks to the genius of mankind there was a chemical on the way for every threat to my pastoral vision. Agent Orange, a cocktail of garden chemicals raining decades of
death, agony and destruction down on the verdant forests of Vietnam, was not then on the curriculum. Have we moved on? The EU is slowly weaning us off our arsenal of garden chemicals, but my pastoral vision has now taken on a distinct plastic hue. The grass is still green but it no longer needs mowing; in fact it needs neither soil or worms or other little creatures. Just as well maybe, as the worms and little creatures are no longer in the soil. The blackbird may be in the tree but it no longer sings. But fear not, Diarmuid Gavin has been here. He has installed a switch at the garden gate, and not only will the garden revolve and go up and down, but also a dawn chorus of bird song will gush from discreet speakers in the trees and a plastic blackbird will catch a plastic worm on the plastic lawn!
HAS THERE BEEN ONE WRONG TURN TOO MANY IN A MERE 50 YEARS? Reflecting on how to help us grasp the reality of deep landscape, I happened on the concept of the Ancient Acre, probably subconsciously suggested by the thought provoking song Ancient Rain by Cork’s own Jimmy McCarthy (best sung by the earthy Mary Coughlan). Rain is very ancient, pouring down long before man arrived and as it will do long after Trump Man has burnt out his reign. The landscape under our feet consists of many ancient acres, each with a story to tell of the game of nature and man, and of man and nature. Every ancient acre of land/water is subject to competing demands and the most overbearing, if not aggressive, relate to human land or water use. The history of the human race is a story largely spun around the use or abuse of the land/ water resource of our planet. In its earlier millennia the human bipeds used to be just one part of nature – another species,
“Agent Orange, a cocktail of garden chemicals raining decades of death, agony and destruction down on the verdant forests of Vietnam, was not then on the curriculum”
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HORTICULTURECONNECTED / www.horticulture.ie / Winter 2017
