Another Life/Michael Viney: The polytunnel creaks, clanks and shivers in the autumn gales like a yacht in a winter marina, its clamour reverberating in the unfamiliar emptiness inside. Gone now the great thickets, spires and canopies of summer leaves. We are back to ground-level lettuce, carrots and cauliflowers-in-waiting.
The tunnel was meant, if you remember, to save work: a place where one could tend vegetables on bad days and so avoid the urgent marathons on good ones. Such economies of effort were latterly quite overwhelmed by the need to pick and keep picking, especially of Carol Leenstra's climbing Italian green beans.
Vouched for as a European "heirloom" variety by the Irish Seed Saver Association, a twin row of the beans swiftly spiralled up their strings and stretched out their tendrils in all directions, soon creating a great canopy of greenery and flowers, ultimately of hundreds of dangling beans to be located half by touch, as by a patient monkey in a rain forest.
They now form a whole stratum in a chest freezer solidly packed with produce, notably sweetcorn, tomatoes and countless boxes of ratatouille. This "vegetable stew in the style of Nice", as Jane Grigson labelled it, is at once the most delectable invention of Provence and the best possible way of coping with a late-summer deluge of tomatoes, courgettes, peppers and aubergines (all simmered together with garlic, olive oil and onions). Hot, cold or with almost anything, ratatouille is one of the world's great comfort foods.
The tunnel also fed a young robin, which took up early residence in the warmth, catching the myriad flies that buzzed beneath the roof and roosting among the beans by night. Its idyll was rudely interrupted by a sparrowhawk, which I found dashing back and forth inside, whacking the plastic with its bill and seemingly quite unable to find the open door through which it had swooped. Tumbling at last into a corner, it surrendered into my hands: a lovely young male with a brilliant yellow rim to his eyes and cool, silky feathers. Carried outside and tossed into the air, he flew off rather groggily.
The robin was succeeded by a family of blackbirds that quickly discovered the succulence of huge "beefsteak" tomatoes in trusses weighed down to the ground. Keeping tunnel doors open is a must through the summer, or rots and mildews will multiply, so I rigged up door-curtains of ragged fish-net, beachcombed from the shore against such emergencies.
My own seed-saving this autumn (along with Ms Leenstra's climbing Italian beans, which will certainly bear re-sowing) has included a few of the thousands from a wild umbellifer, alexanders, that made a surprising and handsome appearance last spring right outside my study window.
Alexanders travelled west from Egypt with the Romans and arrived in Ireland's monastic gardens early enough to earn an Irish name, lus na ngrán. It has since made itself at home in warm and sheltered places on the Irish coast - but not, so far, on this side of the hill. Should I also scatter its seed along the boreen, on my morning round with the dog? That might be "forging nature's signature", in Praeger's disapproving phrase. But gardeners, farmers and feedstuff mills having been messing up the floral record for centuries, almost always by chance. As botanist Sylvia Reynolds shows in her recent book, A Catalogue of Alien Plants in Ireland, the foreign plants recorded over the past couple of centuries - about 920 so far - is not far short of the total of native species.
Most of them are garden escapes, easily spotted as exotic. Almost 20 kinds of cotoneaster, for example, have taken off into wild, rocky places at some point, whether self-sown or in autumnal bird droppings. And wallflowers have found perches on old walls, ruins and coastal cliffs, enduring almost indefinitely in their yellow-flowered, perennial form. But it might take a botanist to know that the golden-flowered tansy that grows wild on my field-bank is, like the alexanders, a "relic of cultivation", dating from monkish, medieval borrowings from abroad.
Sylvia Reynolds' hefty catalogue is very browsable (but no pictures: you have to know your plants). I liked her note: "Beside Trinity College library, where students eat their sandwiches." A Catalogue of Alien Plants in Ireland is available from the Herbarium, National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, for €27 including postage, or from the gardens' bookshop.
This seems to have been a year of unusual numbers of by-the-wind-sailors (Velella). Dr David McGrath is compiling a report and would like any records sent to him at Dave.McGrath@gmit.ie