Oh for a 'juicy and jostling shock' of bluebells

Another Life: The early-morning boreen offers, on one side, field banks smothered with primroses; on the other, meadows full of pristine, toyshop lambs.

They gaze wide-eyed at a lone pedestrian marching in earphones to the river and back, closing out their baaing with Lyric FM - Vivaldi's Spring, all too probably, with violins chirping away.

A few bluebells in the shade of the hazel bank would complete the season's iconography, but Hyacinthoides non-scriptus thins out dramatically in Mayo, surviving mainly in fragmentary old oakwoods, stoutly fenced. Besides, a few bluebells aren't enough for what Gerard Manley Hopkins rhapsodised as "falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue". He also knew how, in your fist, the flower-stalks rub and click "in a juicy and jostling shock", thus connecting exactly with the sheaves once borne home on my handlebars from the ancient woods of Sussex.

There is something indelibly local about bluebells, as if the marvel of one's first childhood encounter imprinted a special sense of place, complete with sounds, smells and shadows. Bluebells don't have to grow in woods, and can thrive on cliff-tops or under the bracken on windswept islands (as on the Saltees, off Wexford). But they do need continuity, of the sort old copses offer, so that trees and flowers together are what fix the place in mind - the sudden haze of deep, ultramarine blue, like a lake or a drift of bonfire smoke.

Bluebells are doing alright where their habitat is left alone, but destruction of scrub and hedgerows often leads to losing them. The flower's special local significance makes it a good choice for involving ordinary people in an exercise in mapping a species. This month's bluebell survey in Clare is just one, indeed, of a "juicy and jostling shock" of local initiatives in the cause of conserving "heritage", biodiversity and the rest.

To anyone concerned for the natural and historic landscape, the degree of local activity sparked off and supported by the Heritage Council is most impressive. The Council set up the network of heritage officers, drawn from all kinds of disciplines, who work in county councils and have involved everyone in sight in drawing up "action plans", budgets and timetables (the Clare Heritage Plan alone has more than 56 partners).

Looking at what they've taken on, one can only be inspired by their energy and local impact - but also a bit worried about some of their resources. It took forever, for example, for the Government to produce a National Biodiversity Plan, which then required each county to draw up a Local Biodiversity Plan of its own. To quote from Spot the 101 Habitats and Species in County Clare, a model of popular local information, the main job of the county's plan is "to translate Irish and international policies and legislation into effective local action on the ground" along with getting the public aware and involved. It will even "identify all the habitats and species present in Clare and prioritise the vital actions necessary to conserve biodiversity of both national and local importance." That is quite a buck to have passed to county level, where it becomes just one objective in the county heritage plan. Even given the blazing enthusiasm of people like the Clare heritage officer, Congella McGuire, and the "biodiversity action plan project manager", Elaine Keegan, one wonders where all the fieldwork and science are going to come from. The 101 species Keegan samples, however great their diversity, are the merest pinch from the vast thousands of different animals and plants living in the county.

Even bluebells are not always what they seem. The one we think we know, and that grows so delightfully in the ancient hazel groves of the Burren, is named non-scripta, or "unlettered", to sort the bluebells of these islands from the hyacinth of classical myth. But two other kinds also grow wild in Ireland. The Spanish bluebell, Hyacinthoides hispanicus, with broad leaves, upright flowers and no smell, is a garden escape found mainly in Leinster and the midlands. Its hybrid with our unlettered native, showing a mix of characteristics, occurs mainly in Munster.

Keegan's bluebell booklet, used for recording locations, allows for such errant discoveries in Clare and I hope it catches the public fancy. Any month now, we may get the long-awaited National Biological Records Centre urged by the Heritage Council and so essential to planning conservation. It will have a lot of catching up to do, and not just on bluebells. But even at the margins of scientific fieldwork, anything that engages public concern for nature has to be worthwhile.

Elaine Keegan is at the Forward Planning Section, Clare County Council, New Road, Ennis, Co Clare. Bluebell sightings can also be recorded through links on a website: www.clarelibrary.ie.