For top-class flowers and grass, use posh poop, guano and frass

When it comes to finding different ways of improving plant growth, we gardeners have never been a squeamish lot. So while “livestock manure” or “dung” are really just polite terms for well-rotted animal or bird excrement, I don’t know of any gardener who would turn their noses up at a trailer-load of the stuff, which is wonderfully rich in organic matter as well as in vital plant nutrients.

In this way, cows, pigs, horses, deer, sheep, chickens and even pigeons have all done their patriotic bit to contribute to the fertility of Irish gardens over the centuries, along with some more exotic animals too. The OPW, for example, happily uses some of the animal waste produced in Dublin Zoo to manure the city’s historic parks and gardens.

As for human waste, before the modern era of the flushing loo, "night soil" was the euphemistic term used to refer to the waste collected from cesspools and privies – outdoor toilets – which was composted into manure and used by market gardeners. In Ireland, the colloquial term for the men entrusted with this unlovely job was "dung dodgers"; in the second volume of his autobiography Pictures in the Hallway, the Dublin-born playwright Sean O'Casey describes them arriving "to empty out the petties and ashpits in the back yards of the people, filling the place with a stench that didn't disappear for a week".

Farther afield

Other useful manures came from much farther afield, such as Peruvian guano, briefly but hugely fashionable in the Victorian era. Made from the droppings of seabirds that nested on steep cliffs, its collection was both hazardous and horridly smelly, but hugely profitable for the British companies that controlled it. Ironically, that popularity proved to be the downfall of the guano industry, resulting in the rapid decline of the Peruvian seabird population (no birds, no guano). Entrepreneurial types tried selling alternatives of bat guano and seal guano, but with less success.

More recently, there's been a very 21st century addition to the range of manures/fertilisers/soil enhancers mentioned above, in the unlikely form of insect poop. Or to use a more technical term, premium-grade beetle "frass", a natural by-product of the larvae of the Tenebrio molitor beetle, more commonly known as the mealworm. Marketed as a soil conditioner and bio-stimulant, and approved for organic use by the Soil Association, those who have used it (it's especially popular with champion vegetable growers and hydroponic gardeners) swear that it has a remarkable effect on plant growth. Just so you know, the mealworms used in its production (it's sold as Ecothrive Charge, see ecothrive.co.uk) are fed a diet of organic carrots and wheat bran. Now there's "posh poop" for you.