Fuchsia's vigour could make it a fuel of the future

ANOTHER LIFE:The sun showed up in time to seal the tranquillity proper to our hillside in September. The long, calm days glazed the ocean blue, burnished the fuchsia bells in the hedge, bleached the curling bracken to an even, golden tan.

Above all came the great September silence, arching from the top of the ridge to the far horizon – a peacefulness made all the more profound by the odd tractor dashing to a late cut of silage, and the rasp of my chainsaw at the stack of timber over the wall.

We were all waiting to get things done: hedges cut, grass mowed, houses painted, fences mended. The woodshed echoed for want of logs. A lorry-load of Coillte’s forestry thinnings can feed one household stove for years, but preferably with logs cut from lengths of trunk brought under cover well ahead of winter. And while an electric chainsaw starts on a button and runs without fumes, it does need a day that keeps the cable dry and thus one’s mind at ease.

As oil runs low, our conifer forests could yet come to warm the heart of the nation as fuel for stoves and wood-chip boilers. Even the branches and tops left behind could offer some 200,000 tonnes a year of accessible “forest residue”. But – this mused upon while sitting on a smooth butt of spruce, soaking up the sun and quietude – could the linear native woodland of our hedgerows also find a future in farmhouse fuel?

In January last year, Teagasc proudly announced that 15,000 farmers will plant “an incredible length of 5,000km of new native Irish hedgerows in the next few years [to] change the landscape of every parish in Ireland”. They are recruits to REPS (the Rural Environment Protection Scheme) that winds down finally in 2015. After that, who knows? REPS was never, said the minister, meant to be an income support.

Along with the new planting, a further 2,800km of existing hedgerows will be rejuvenated by coppicing – cutting back the old hawthorn and blackthorn and making them sprout again, this time with proper management to keep them woven, tight and stockproof. But an intermingling of sycamore, ash and alder could also, perhaps, do something for the hearth.

On our own unkempt acre, a mix of a dozen kinds of trees have closed into a canopy: and some judicious coppicing wouldn’t go amiss. We’ve begun with the old fuchsia hedges that, in the original bare field, sheltered the seedling trees from salt winds. Their remnants now straggle up in the shade to three or four metres high and time has thickened some of their branches to a fat man’s arm. Fuchsia – a surprise – dries out as a hardwood, streaked with purple sap, and logs of it burn with a fine, slow heat.

Left to itself on fairly frost-free, well-drained soil, the shrub can run wild in Ireland. The Knight of Kerry planted one bush at Glanleam on windswept Valentia Island in 1854. By 1870, the circumference of the thicket was nearing 120ft, and by 1905 it reached over 290ft, which brought it to the cliff edge. When fuchsia grows tall and blows flat, it puts down new roots and moves on. Push a stout twig of it deep into a field-bank and, like willow, it is growing in a couple of months. As Ireland warms, it is a biofuel bush to think about. Pushing bits of it into ditches is how Fuchsia magellanica Riccartonii, a garden hybrid bred in Scotland, came to furnish Irish "bohreens fuchsia-high", to quote John Betjeman. And despite some puzzling reports of seed being sold in Kerry, botanists from Robert Lloyd Praeger to E Charles Nelson (a former horticultural taxonomist at the National Botanic Gardens) have insisted that the hybrid rarely sets seed before its dangling flower drops off – this despite the attentions of myriad bumblebees.

Fuchsia, as it happens, gets only brief attention in the latest of the lovely books that have marked Dr Nelson's love affair with the history of Ireland's plant life, both wild and cultivated. An Irishman's Cuttings(The Collins Press, €29.99) moves engagingly between the two in a compendium of essays first published in The Irish Gardenmagazine. Now beautifully furnished with photographs and botanical illustrations, they conserve his fascinating research and bring it to a deservedly wider audience.

It’s easy to forget that today’s garden plants started off in the wild, somewhere in China, New Zealand or Chile, and that Ireland’s pioneer plant-hunters were also naturalists enchanted with the native plants that grew at home. Some of these are extraordinary enough – the strawberry tree and Killarney fern, for example, and Connemara’s St Dabeoc’s heath, and the great sundew that Darwin sent for and fed with roast beef and flies. They root down well in this big, satisfying book that roams from the mistletoe of a Dublin archbishop to the sea beans of our Atlantic shores.

EYE ON NATURE:

Thousands of small, brown jellyfish (1-2ins in diameter) similar to Chrysaora have been washed ashore in Connemara. What species are they?

Brendan O’Sullivan, Cashel, Co Galway

Most likely Pelagia noctiluca which can give a painful sting, and are luminescent when disturbed at night. There was another invasion of them in 2007.

Recently what looks like spoonfuls of scrambled egg have been appearing on our lawn overnight. After a day or so these fade to a white breadcrumb consistency, then disappear.

Elizabeth MacMahon, Shankill, Dublin, 18

It is the slime mould Fuligo septica, which is neither animal nor vegetable but has characteristics of both, being able to move in search of food by means of contractions. It lives on bacteria and fungi. The yellow stage develops into a fungus-like, spore-containing fruiting body. It is often hidden in leaf mould or decaying matter.

A dozen or so Red Admiral butterflies overtook my boat in Roaringwater Bay, Co Cork. They appeared at intervals and flew south against a light onshore wind. Were they migrants?

Anthony Beese, Rosscarbery, Co Cork

These were the progeny of Red Admirals that came here from southern Europe in early summer. They were migrating back.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. Email : viney@anu.ie Include a postal address