Bring on the dancing butterflies

Late in its first summer, the herb garden may be reckoned a sprawling success, even with only half its plants. Viper's bugloss, clary, comfrey, yarrow, mullein, elecampane, rue and the rest have put up vivid, sometimes stately, thickets of flowers, fit for a sunny corner at any lesser abbey. Not, there, herbs for the kitchen; those are where they should be: in beachcombed crates outside the door - rather, plants for curiosity and beauty; an antique pharmacy raised from seed. Only the yarrow is harvested seriously, for a tea to ward off arthritis (or so we are persuaded: an astringent, aromatic taste).

The real bonus of the herbs (not having much dropsy or whooping cough or even, for the moment, the "passions and tremblings of the heart" that viper's bugloss is so good for) is how much the flying insects appreciate them. All summer long, when the rain hasn't actually been knocking them out of the air, bumble bees, butterflies, hoverflies of every description have thronged the flowers for nectar.

Indeed, if I could have just one garden plant for butterflies, it would be the mundane kitchen herb, marjoram (which also grows wild on dry, stony banks in the limier parts of Ireland). Planted in drifts and allowed to bloom, it throws up masses of pink and purple flowers that last from June right through August. To walk into the herb garden in any sunny hour is to wade through a swirl of red admirals and peacocks, high on marjoram nectar (also good for toothache).

This has not been a summer to say much about butterflies, though enough red admirals have reached Thallabawn to take up stations on every side of the house and dash about, darkly defiant, in the gloomiest of rains. There is still time for new generations hatched from both earlier migrants and perhaps a few of our native summer butterflies. It would be nice to see some perfectly ordinary small tortoiseshells, for example, which seem to have vanished from our garden despite its generous reservations of nettles. The new leafiness has, however, convinced a pair of speckled woods, dark-brown and velvety, to take up residence in dappled light along the path.

A summer in which our own butterflies begin to seem precious is a good time to start doing one's bit towards conservation, at least by keeping a record of species seen, and where. And since nature knows no borders, the records might as well go towards mapping the distribution and abundance of butterflies across these islands as a whole. Species are declining, in some habitats disastrously, and - as with birds or wildflowers - conservation depends greatly on knowing what is happening year to year.

A Millennium Butterfly Atlas is the project of the UK voluntary group, Butterfly Conservation, and the Biological Records Centre, also in England. It started in 1995 and will go on until 1999, so there is every point in feeding records from the Republic to the database. They should be sent to Tim Lavery, a professional environmentalist who teaches in Tralee Technical College and has been collecting butterfly and moth records through his network, Country Watch. He also edited the field guide The Butterflies Of Ireland, by the late Norman Hickin (1992).

Looking through the British records for 1995-1996, one can envy the great range of habitats and temperatures that gives the other island its 58 species and gorgeous resident rarities such as the swallowtail (on the Norfolk Broads), the purple emperor (on southern oaks) or Adonis blue (on southern chalk downs). But the dozen or so commonest butterflies in Britain (headed by small tortoiseshell and green-veined white) are also at the top of our own, more modest list of 34 species.

Most of those we haven't got - the extra kinds of skipper, fritillary and blue butterflies - are harboured in the warmer south of England. Instead of hankering after these, we should realise what a precious set of habitats we have in the bogs (for threatened species such as the marsh fritillary and large heath) and the limestone hills of the Burren, where the richest collection of butterflies in Ireland includes all four of our fritillaries.

My recent column on graveyards and the need to keep them nature-friendly touched a chord with the Heritage Service (new face for the old OPW). They sent me a most attractive and plainspoken little booklet called The Care and Conservation of Grave- yards (a mere £1 from Government Publications in Molesworth Street or through any bookseller).

It is directed mainly (and with some urgency, one feels) to those local communities who, looking around for some improving activity, decide to clean up the graveyard. What this has meant, in some ancient places, may be glimpsed in the injunctions not to set about "levelling it off", with or without a digger, not to haul down the ivy from old buildings, and not even to consider sandblasting the lichens off the headstones or straightening up the crooked ones.

Much more tactful and helpful than I may have made it sound, the booklet goes on to encourage nature in every reasonable way, from the bats and birds nesting in ivied walls and tall trees, to the ferns growing in the walls and the wildflowers carpeting out-of-the-way corners. "In heavily farmed land," it points out, "graveyards may be the only oasis left for some varieties of wildlife, including grassland flora." Burning off vegetation is a way to crack gravestones and to damage hidden ruins and old graveyard artifacts; herbicide hits wildlife and clears the ground for a rejuvenation of weeds. Instead, use nothing stronger than a strimmer, and find a friendly botanist to help plan what needs to be done, and what should be left alone.