Spend It Better: What should we do with harvested peat?

Let’s take a wrecking ball to St Patrick’s Cathedral, pound it to rubble and bag up the stones to be sold in garden centres. The limestone will set off the begonias beautifully and we can grind the rest to powder and sprinkle it on the lawn.

Sounds extreme? Slice open a bag of peat compost and you’re handling layers of time, a historic resource that took millennia to create. The act of drying and milling it out of the ground released epic amounts of carbon and destroyed an ecosystem that exists on just 3 per cent of the planet. And we are still selling it dirt cheap in plastic bags.

On Birdwatch Ireland’s recent podcast In your Nature, ecologist Catherine Farrell explained brilliantly how the phrase “bog restoration” is a misnomer. It would take thousands of years to restore the pickled plants, animals, people, ancient oaks and Scots pines that were so efficiently machined out of the heart of our island in the span of one lifetime. The best we can hope for, Farrell said, is bog rehabilitation, rewetting the dry brown deserts to lock down their carbon and let life begin to take hold again with mosses and other pioneer plants. If peat reforms it will be at the rate of about a millimetre a year. Let’s let that loss sink in for a minute.

Bord na Móna announced a formal end to peat harvesting this year in what it called a move from brown to green. But what should be done with the harvested peat? The horticulture industry wants to remain elbow deep in it as long as possible. Britain, one of our largest markets, is reported to be moving towards banning its sale.

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After spotting a pile of bags of Irish peat compost in St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, earlier this year I asked the OPW under Freedom of Information how much it had spent on peat compost since January 2020. The answer was €19,850 or almost 230,000 litres of the brown stuff used in its “national historic properties” over that time frame.

We can ask why one arm of the State is getting out of peat while another is planting tulips in it. But what if the OPW and other State bodies bought up the last stocks and used them to create bog gardens in the wettest parts of our parks and estates? We didn’t leave it in the ground where it belonged. But can we return it to rain gardens, to the edges of ponds, small sodden memorials to what was lost, whispers of a symphony that was silenced, but something to remind us of a unique resource that we are only beginning to appreciate and understand.

Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests