FOR once, a slow spring suits me. After a year constrained from tending the acre, a year in which the maze of hedges was a merciful mask for a garden running wild in the longest, hottest summer for decades, I needed to tackle it still in its winter sleep, quiescent and amenable; any uprush of sap could have panicked me. With the wind still in the east and a scarecrow's coat wrapped around my kidneys, I crept back among welcoming, mossy smells, loppers and bush-saw in hand.
At a guess, last summer increased the biomass of Ireland - the total standing crop of leaves, trunks and branches - by at least a quarter over average. Our own young oaks stretched up by more than a metre and the fuschia bushes seized new salients in their constant ambition to be trees. They grow with a crimson passion and spread by falling down and springing up again. First, a bough leans in the wind, then it collapses to the soil and puts out a new set of roots.
In this way, one bush becomes a thicket, indefinitely cloned. There is a record of a fuchsia planted in 1854 in the gardens of Glanleam, on Valentia Island in Kerry. By 1871 it was getting on for five metres high and its circumference was measured at 115 feet. Here on the acre, a few sawn-off branches left lying on a bank of the stream have grown whole new bushes, head-high.
Blackberry briars have much the same vegetative drive, arching for metres before touching down to root. A couple of seasons can weave a thicket the size of a Volvo. Confronting one of these (while leaving others "for the birds"), I try to generate a trance of acceptance, chopping the brambles steadily into little pieces, one by one, for hours.
The most taxing job of redemption this spring, however, has been the clearing of the pond. When the frogs arrived to mate, rather later than usual, they found no sign of water but a mattress of grass floating where it used to be. Undeterred, they left a score of spawn-masses which gathered on the grass on frosty mornings like jellies made from ice.
It is disillusioning to find grass growing on water as if it belonged there not just floating at the edges but moving on, out and across and putting down little roots for liquid nourishment on the way.
The truth is, I fed the pond too well when I made it, flooring the plastic lining with soil and stocking it with every water-plant at hand: bog-bean and horse-tail, water-mint and water-lily, burreed marsh marigold and many more. It is every pond's ambition to fill itself in and join the rest of dry land and I have helped this along by rearing too rich a biomass with nowhere else to go.
The grass was anchored by a forest of underwater stems. Leaning, out, I sawed it into slices, undercut its hawsers and hauled dripping-green mounds ashore; the spawn slid off readily enough and sank. This was, I suppose, disgracefully like a county council cutting the hedges at nesting time; a few frogs came up to inspect the devastation.
The shining shape of water, topped up from the garden hose, reminded me that I had originally wanted a pond for its reflections of flowers and ferns and moving clouds. But while you can weed and prune a garden border for just the right aesthetic effect, a pond is designable only in the simplest, most artificial elements: two water-lilies, maybe, half-a-dozen hand-fed fish and an electric fountain.
A WILDLIFE pond is a quite different entity. Cobbled together hopefully from random lake-plants, sown with unguessable eggs and larvae held in lumps of mud, it is committed to progressive - and sometimes chaotic - change. My ring of bright water, now so horribly bleak and denuded, will quickly furnish itself again with leaves and flowers and dragonflies, look pretty for a year or two, then make another dash into being a marsh.
Just for looking at casually, in fact, a wildlife pond can be frankly disappointing: it needs to be looked into, lived with and cared for, all of which most children do particularly well. The basics of creating, stocking and managing a pond are included in Patrick Madden's splendid new booklet, Go Wild At School.
This is a step-by-step guide to creating a wildlife garden on school, grounds and the frontispiece is a map of Mr Madden's award-winning endeavour at Scoil Treasa in Donore Avenue in Dublin. Here pond and marsh take their place beside the meadow and the mini-wood, but the author knows well that many schools would find it impossible to defend a pond against vandals.
His practicality impresses. A tree nursery, a native hedgerow, a patch for bees and butterflies - each project has its shopping list, its schedule of work, its monthly calendar. April is the time for sowing germinated seeds of ash, hawthorn and holly, for sowing sunflowers and sweet corn, for studying creatures in the compost heap; October, not April, is the time for thinning the pond.
Patrick Madden worries that nature will be short-changed in the new, broad range of "environmental studies". What's wanted, he says, is a feeling for ecology - the links in food chains, the interdependence of all creatures - rather, than unrelated class lessons on isolated species. Where better to gain this sense of the interacting whole than in natural habitats, ever-changing and created by the children themselves?