Winds of the west plant a seed for gardening by the sea

ANOTHER LIFE:IT TOOK A FEW days to show the full effect of gaoth ruadh, the blasting, reddening wind from the sea. The storm that banjaxed a presidential helicopter swept through the summer gardens of the west, flaying potatoes in Donegal, shredding lettuce in Achill, tossing magpies from their nests in Connemara. And with the wind came an invisible flux of salt spray to scorch the seaward flanks of trees and hedges into a dismal, autumnal withering.

On our acre, the polytunnel held firm in its new, tight skin, and the wind roared up the tall hedges and over the canopy of trees. Before we had such shelter, warnings of summer storms would send us out with big pieces of fishing net salvaged from the shore: spread across the potatoes and tied to stakes, they calmed the tender haulm and saved the crop. Now, even my tall broad beans, while laid low, have raised their flowering stems again.

The salt damage is dramatic and oddly precise, like the work of some demon with a blowtorch. I look out at an elder tree divided into two, the inward half still green and panicled with creamy blossom, the seaward half hanging in dark shreds. A beech tree that had grown so bravely and beautifully domed has been seared into a wedge-shape after all.

Wind-moulded trees are iconic of the west – flagged, as some foresters say: tilting arabesques of hawthorn, sloping farmhouse sycamores.

Neither is an actual bending to the wind, but a steady, chemical shearing of seaward shoots by aerosols of salt, leaving active growth to stream out from the leeward side of the tree. In a big winter storm, the flight of salt droplets whipped from the crests of waves can dowse the whole coastal margin in spray (at the old Brackloon oakwood, beside Croagh Patrick, a cycle of January storms once delivered, in two weeks, 78 per cent of the salt for the whole year). At the first kilometre of coast, the droplets are actually seawater, with its load of the main marine ions: sodium chloride, magnesium and sulphate. As the wind travels inland, the droplets are smaller, but still carry salt that can be licked from one’s skin.

This storm swept salt further inland than any in living memory, but the old men like to say that. There was a hurricane in New England that scorched trees as far as 70km inland, and chlorine from salt spray has recently been found high in the sky over the very middle of America. Air parcels that travel long distances over the sea are increasingly loaded with salt, so that rain falling at the coast can have several times the content of sodium as seawater itself.

Sodium in the soil stresses plants by limiting their water intake; drawn into the cells chloride ions can be toxic, the edges of leaves curling and crisping into death. Half a century ago, An Foras Talúntais (now Teagasc) looked at the resources of west Donegal and saw salt spray as one good reason for not trying to grow strawberries, for example (this in the days before polytunnels). Even in July, Malin Head gets 10 times as much sodium as Birr in Co Offaly.

May’s salty storm was doubly unfortunate in that it hit the crops of people who were growing their own for the first time.

Others were returning to a lifestyle that included a regular self-sufficiency in potatoes, cabbage and carrots – food which, for a few years, had been happily ceded to the supermarket.

The wind also arrived at a littoral that was aglow with new and beautiful flower gardens. They had suffered one shock already: the impact of unprecedented winter frosts on tender shrubs and hedges. The gale

whipped around shrivelled cordylines, gaunt skeletons of griselinia, withered swords of New Zealand flax. The gardeners of the west and their attendant plant nurseries may need to grow wise in species to survive both salt and ice.

Many plants are indeed salt-tolerant, or halophyte, and in a world where freshwater is becoming a scarce resource and much farmland is turning saline, plants happy at the sea’s edge could have a future as human food crops. Sea kale, for example, once plentiful on Ireland’s coastal shingle banks, makes a delicious garden vegetable when its big spring shoots are blanched under buckets or clay pots. Trialled by a Dutch university, it responded to increasing salinity with even thicker and juicier leaves.

Wild sea beet is another halophyte, and it gave us the succulent stems of Swiss chard. There could be lessons here about gardening by the sea.

Eye on nature

We found a buff-tip moth on our door. It was cleverly camouflaged as a stick but was fooled by a PVC wood-look-alike door.

Sean Diamond, Maghera, Co Derry

Does anyone share my fears over the onward march of mare’s tail ( equisetum)? Now only one street from my garden, it is gobbling up derelict and empty spaces at the expense of all other vegetation. The plant seems to have no enemies, not even weed-killer.

Jeff Dudgeon, Mount Prospect Park, Belfast

The plant, Equisetum arvense, is horsetail, one of the oldest plants on the planet, the only survivor of a class that is 100 million years old. Mare’s tail, Hippuris vulgaris, is a different plant and grows in water. Horsetail reproduces by spores and root division. It has roots that go down 1.5m, which can be killed by brushwood herbicide. It can also be eradicated by digging out the roots and hoeing any survivors 3cm below the soil before they reach 7cm. But that is an immense task.

Is it true that magpies kill smaller birds and is there a good way to keep them away from my home?

Fintan Courtney, Ballinascarthy, Co Cork

Magpies take eggs and nestlings. Provide better cover in the garden to protect nests.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or viney@anu.ie. Please iInclude a postal address.