I grew up in Wexford on a small farm. I was the youngest of six kids. I’m 51 now. Things were different back then; you didn’t have a huge amount of restriction. I basically wandered around on my own, most of the time outside, and I got to know the natural world. I made connections there in a deeper way than I ever have with people.
I remember I wandered off up to the top of the farm into this tiny field. There was a three-metre-wide gap, where my dad used to drive his little Massey Ferguson through.
I went into the gap, and I knew something had happened. There was a feeling that something had changed. There was no gap any more, it had kind of filled in magically. I was stuck.
I told my dad about it years later. He said the same thing had happened to his grandfather in that field. It was known locally that there was a stray sod there, which is an old Irish kind of fairy field thing. If you step on a particular patch, you’ll be completely lost.
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I remember getting distracted by the sunshine and the butterflies and bees. I sat down, and I felt like I was being watched. I looked around, and it was the plants. It was the beginning of my animism. The belief that all creatures, everything, has soul and spirit.
My mum really wanted all of her kids to go through college. I really fancied this guy studying landscape design in UCD. So I thought, sure, I’ll go there. That lasted about five minutes, but I stayed with the course, just because I didn’t know what else to do.
The way I used to work was treating land as an extension of people’s homes, like outdoor rooms. I used to push out all the natives and plant all these pretty flowers, non-native grasses, trees and shrubs that were garden-centre-sanctioned plants. They may have been fashionable at the time, but none of them have anything to do with the local food webs.
The biggest driver of energy into our food webs is caterpillars, larvae. It’s not the pollinator-friendly plants that we’ve all been sold on. It’s the native plants that feed larvae, and without them, everything collapses.
There are fewer than 1,000 native plant species in Ireland. Native plants are hardly anywhere. They’re not in people’s gardens. They’re not in our public spaces. They’re very rarely used. But native plant communities are the foundation stone of all life on this planet. They are the only solution.
My life is based around trying to remind people of what Ireland and the world should look like. I call myself a reformed landscape designer because I realised that gardening is a huge part of the unravelling. I started the global movement We Are the ARK – or Acts of Restorative Kindness – to restore native ecosystems of any size, rewilding and reweaving nature together, patch by patch.
I just find it so difficult to watch what we’re doing to the Earth. If I didn’t have kids, I’d probably be up on the top of a hill somewhere, tied to a stone with a sword by my side. It’s funny the way the world works. The kids both tied me down and kept me sane.
People think everything is fine because it looks like what they’ve always known, but they don’t know that the air used to be loud with the sound of insects, or that the waves and sea were literally hopping with life. They don’t know that the rivers were crystal clear and full of fish, that we had hedgehogs strolling around at dawn, and so much bird life. There was so much life.
My parents left me six acres of land. I was very lucky to get it. Most people are not this lucky. I watch all the land around me just being constantly poisoned and sprayed and razed, the ditches removed and the trees pulled out, and it’s hard not to despair. Then I get really excited about who comes to share the land with me. There are all sorts of creatures hanging around. It’s like a Disney cartoon.
When I step out into this land, it feels like a portal for me into who I really am. It accepts me. I don’t have to pretend. I don’t have to wear a mask. I don’t have to do anything. I just have to be myself, and what a gift that is.
The kids are in college now. It’s hard work. I can’t give up and disappear into the land yet. I have to keep going with earning money.
I have so many opportunities, but I have no idea how to go about these things. If I was any good at all as a businesswoman, I’m sure I could have easily set myself up as a kind of a ARKing Ballymaloe. But I’m terrible at all that side of life.
There are times when I don’t have any money, and these times happen regularly because of the way I am. In those times, I don’t care about nature. The collapse of society goes hand in hand with the collapse of nature, because you cannot care when you have nothing. You would eat the last frog, or whatever was left, because survival kicks in. So we can’t blame the poorest in our society for what’s happening.
I’m not perfect. I’m just trying to make it work and trying to do it with integrity as much as I can. It doesn’t really matter if we are all gone, but it’s the fact that we are taking everything down with us. I’d like to leave a better legacy than this.
In conversation with Rosanna Cooney. This interview is part of a series with well-known people about their lives and relationship with Ireland
