Garlic, medicine of the ancients

At the year's end, the soil in my raised beds can be crumbly as porter-cake and moist as plum pudding, as its myriad worm-holes exude a dark, spicy smell of decay. One longs to sow something, as an invocation to the gods of plenty.

Garlic was my choice this December, being suitably entwined with good magic. Hallowe'en, indeed, is my more usual planting date for a bulb which, despite its sun-baked, Mediterranean associations, is perfectly hardy in our winters. Like all the alliums, it is acutely sensitive to day length and makes its root and leaf growth in the short days of the year.

December is stretching it a bit, but in Thallabawn's light and welldrained soil, close to the ocean, I can take chances unthinkable in Birr or Clones. In such Arctic frost-spots, planting will be safer in late February or March, at least until global warming has opened the winter to us all.

My 100-odd cloves of garlic, peeled from the best bulbs of last year's harvest and planted a hand's breadth apart, will shoot up into a martial crop (Anglo-Saxon gar, a spear; lac, a plant) quite immune to pests or diseases. When it ripens in a sunny summer, I can weave crisp, white, Spanish-looking skeins of bulbs to hang from hooks in the kitchen. But last summer's crop was a bit muddy, and is falling apart in paper bags. Every shred will find its use: we even chop it, raw, into sandwiches.

Twenty years ago, ours was the only garlic likely to be growing on this side of the hill. Some callers at that time seemed to prefer to converse at a distance, while gazing out sideways, over the sea: a stance we took as peculiar to the reflective rural culture of the townland. Now, you wouldn't know what you'd find in the vegetable gardens behind the new B&Bs. And with our Christmas visitors from the city, of course, no amount of hugs and kisses at the gate produces any visible recoil. The whole urban, foodie middle-class is safely saturated with the pungent, volatile, essential oil of Allium sativum - a sulphide so diffusive, says Mrs Grieve's Modern Herbal, "that even when the bulb is applied to the soles of the feet, its odour is exhaled by the lungs".

The cultivation of garlic goes back to the earliest of agriculture - to the ancient Sumerians and Scythians, at any rate - but the date of its arrival in Irish gardens is a matter of some scholarly dispute. Dr Fergus Kelly, exploring the law texts of the seventh and eighth centuries for his book, Early Irish Farming, devotes several fascinating pages to the precise meaning of an Old Irish word "cainnenn", clearly a highlyregarded plant among the Celtic farmers and their nobles.

The enclosed gardens of prosperous farms were closely involved with herbal medicine and the care of the sick, and one legal document stresses a high-ranking invalid's entitlement to cainnenn, unless his doctor forbade it on medical grounds. Another specified it as a relish for the bread a farmer must provide for the annual visit of his lord: there must be "sixteen cloves of true cainnenn for each loaf, or four plants of true cainnenn for each loaf".

This sounds very much like garlic, as some scholars have concluded. But Dr Kelly points to a text about food-rents which specifies "a handful of green cainnenn with their tops" and to other lordly contracts expecting a farmer to grow half-a-dozen ridges of the vegetable, which he seems to feel is a lot. He finds a comment in Middle Irish that cainnenn brings tears to the eyes. Garlic isn't eaten until the leaves wither; nor does it sting the eyes.

He plumps for bunching onions, or scallions, as the favourite topping for a Celtic crust. He may well be right, but could also be underestimating the appetite of a different age. "Cainneann" has survived as the word for leek in Dineen's Irish dictionary.

The native American tribes, for example, considered their wild alliums, onions and garlic, as staple food and ate them in huge quantities. The early Irish, too, used a lot of wild garlic, Allium ursinum, or crim. This beautiful plant, with its broad lily-of-the-valley leaves, fills the damper woodland shadows with starry white flowers in May, sometimes drowning out the bluebells with an odour as pungent as the Paris Metro. An annual "crimfeis", or garlic feast was provided by a Celtic client to his lord (plus three retainers), who munched the leaves along with cheese and milk. These are milder than their smell suggests: Oliver Rackham, the English woodland historian, adds them to his peanut-butter sandwiches when out among the ancient oaks.

The huge virtue of garlic, apart from its majestic organ-notes of flavour, lies in the extraordinary range of its medicinal and anti-bacterial action. In the first World War, the Society of United Irishwomen (forerunners of the ICA) formed special units to collect sphagnum moss to make surgical dressings: almost a million tons were brought in from the bogs. The moss itself was better than cotton wool for absorbency and coolness, and dipping it in garlic juice prevented sepsis and gangrene in wounds: thousands of soldiers owed their lives to what could have seemed a primitive piece of folkmedicine.

Modern herbals of the more sober sort give garlic credit for success in controlling a long list of disorders and diseases, from dysentery to typhoid and TB, and current research seems to confirm many of garlic's reputed healing properties. It reduces cholesterol, blood-pressure and blood-clotting, which may be why France, with Europe's highest consumption of fat, has one of the lowest incidences of heart disease. Garlic is a plant remedy still awaiting its full role - if not, necessarily, in aromatherapy.