Another Life: Short tongues, shallow flowers – insects and umbellifers

No one on the Atlantic coast expects much better of July, a regularly wet and sticky month. One might have looked to climate change to offer some bizarre interjection of sun. (Not too bizarre, thank you.) Instead the steady drizzle from the ocean’s supersaturated sky have rendered hedges unclippable, lawns unmowable, a plant world running riot from invigorating draughts of carbon dioxide.

Bracken has cloaked even steeper slopes of Killary Fjord, at least on the sunny, northern side, and Connacht’s gunnera weed hoists parasols of shade wherever it is left to root. A townland meadow, once dutifully cleared of bracken, now flourishes a forest of marsh thistles in its place; ewes and their lambs nibble narrow paths between.

On our acre, long tentacles of briars leap out of the shrubbery, and what used to be a lawn has elected a fresh thicket from the self-seeded menu of succession. The drier bit has sprouted happy clumps of hawkbit, the daintier sort of dandelion, and self-heal studs the grass with little spires of purple. Over in the trees’ shade it’s sorrel, raising tall, feathery panicles of crimson.

All this befits old meadowland – as also, I suppose, do abundant towers of an umbellifer that, even in its current charm, I must call hogweed. Geoffrey Grigson, gathering folk names for The Englishman's Flora half a century ago, could offer a litany including "gipsy's lace" and "humpy-scrumples", along with more earthy sobriquets to do with pigs. "To see the village people bringing home bundles of this free harvest for the sty is still no uncommon sight," he added.

The Irish feabhrán or searbán na muc also remain resolutely porcine, with no special appreciation of the plant's delicate, moon-white interweave of blossom. The nectar-rich florets open more or less simultaneously, so that, as John Feehan described in his Wildflowers of Offaly, they make the flower heads "a veritable banqueting table for insects".

He cites one German study that counted no fewer than 118 insect species visiting hogweed, many in great numbers. Most of them are flies with short tongues, to probe the shallow flowers. Among them are dung flies, attracted by the hogweed’s cow-like smell – “cow parsnip” is, indeed, another name for it – and shiny, metallic carrion flies, which suck honey alongside rosy-red soldier beetles, some pausing for copulation.

Such colourful insect orgies are common to many umbellifers. My drawing recalls a blue tit snatching a little fly from a clump of alexanders, or "parsley of Alexandria", that grows outside my workroom window. Its flowers are a bright greeny yellow, and both the plant's uncommon "common" name and its scientific one, Smyrnium olusatrum, hint at Middle Eastern origins. Brought to Ireland with the monks as a food plant for the monastery garden, it has long run wild on the mild west coast, spread by prolific production of tough, black seeds, one from each little floret.

An alien relative of hogweed, the giant Heracleum mantegazzanum, has an even vaster seed output and a spread along Ireland's riverbanks that offers both ecological and public-health hazards.

The sap of giant hogweed contains compounds called furanocoumarins, the plant’s defence against herbivores, large and small. The chemicals are also, unfortunately, highly toxic to human skin when exposed to the ultraviolet rays of sunlight, raising severe blisters and even long-lasting scars. They are also present in our native hogweed, which is best not strimmed in bright sun, and they have been blamed for “celery picker’s itch”. (Pigs, perhaps, chewed their hogweed in the shade.)

Celery, like so many common vegetables, is another of the Umbelliferae, a word for the plant family that rolls nicely off the tongue and reminds us where “umbrella” came from – the very shape and structure of the final flower head, clustering many umbels of florets on radiating spokes of stems.

In current botany, however, the preferred term is Apiaceae, the parsley or carrot family, with about 3,000 species. They include many of the culinary herbs – fennel, coriander, chervil and so on – and the dill in the tunnel offers exquisite sprays of golden stars.

First outside on the acre are the pignuts, growing early enough in spring not to need to fight for light or make tall stems. I have dug deep beneath them to harvest the tuber, like a big white hazelnut, that free-roaming pigs also used to root for. It tastes well enough – quite nutty, indeed – and gives rural meaning to the nursery-song line “Here we go gathering nuts in May.”

But really spectacular and statuesque is the metre-high angelica, hoisting its purple stems and pink-flushed dome of smaller domes. In late summer these become the supreme nectar takeaway for insects of every flying kind – even butterflies at times, wings spread in sweet satisfaction.

Michael Viney's Reflections on Another Life, a selection of columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks