Glittering Prizes lie among the flotsam

AN unseasonal wind the other day stripped the petals from the hawthorn in swirls of reckless confetti and left the flowers with just their tufts of stamens, which made the hedges look whiskery and odd.

The same storm, finding my prize clump of delphiniums in a state of perfect, shoulder-high leafiness and just about to send up spires of blossom to unprecedented heights (a deep blue, shot with purple, incredibly lovely) snapped half, of them earthwards again. Part of me mourned, part accepted the chastisement; you don't grow delphiniums that try to outshine an ocean.

it was the first real gale in months and had a lot of sweeping up to do at sea it might deliver some flotsam in compensation. I trudged out to a tideline scribbled heavily in seaweed, regretting - almost - the long calms that have piled the shore with soft, ankle-deep sand.

Lots of plastic. Distant, twisted fertiliser bags posing as drowned mermaids, dozing albatrosses, unclaimed bales of pot - something interesting that always disappoints when you get up to it. And plastic nearer at hand - a long, black tripwire, of the tough stuff used in baling machines, almost sent me sprawling.

Following it along the tideline, in and out of the sand, I came at last to a whole, tangled mass of it, enough to truss up and strangle half-a-hundred whales. Sometimes I imagine all this flotsam of plastic working down through the sand and compressing into a dense, marbled, geological stratum next to the real rock.

And yet, of course, Ii am seduced by some of it and put it gratefully to use.

The space outside the kitchen window, a patio of sorts, is our gallery of plastic jetsam. There are milk-crates from dairies in Massachusetts, Newfoundland, California, Greece and other foreign parts, and fish-boxes from nearer home, all stamped with variations of one hopeful theme: "Usage par tout autre que la proprietaire est defendu par la loi." Just now their usage is to hold tarragon and chervil, mint and parsley, and finders keepers, so there.

From the latest delivery I heaved up a promising container, chastely white and severely geometrical, like the sort of waste-paper basket they might use at Sellafield, just the job for a small bay tree. And then, glancing along the tideline, I was intrigued by a distant necklace of frankly pretty colours.

Once long ago, in a cove in Connemara, I found one of the last sets of green glass net-floats from a Spanish trawler, intact in their mesh of knotted hemp. It was a beachcomber's prize, smuggled quickly into the car boot, and today it hangs in the porch, an antique. More green glass balls, picked up singly, now glow amid the irises in our Derek Jarman gravel garden.

Ahead of me now was the direct successor to that first Iberian classic: an almost identical string of floats, but of plastic and strung in a mesh of polypropylene cord. What redeems them, as they swing from a nail on the woodshed, is that the balls are a singing, cerulean blue and the mesh is of deep cobalt, a combination charmingly playful and Mediterranean.

Over the years we have collected dozens of the much larger, football-size trawlerballs, finding it difficult to pass one (so new and expensive-looking, so flawlessly round) without sticking a finger in the hole and bringing it home. Their manufacturers are generally Nordic - Iceland, Norway, Denmark, the Faroes - and the colours are warm oranges, yellows and reds to cheer up a chill Atlantic (and simply to be seen among the waves).

I have conceived an eventful plan for these, a personal folly of the kind more normal to little freckled men, much-divorced and living in trailers at the edge of American deserts. This is, to construct a swaying tower of trawler-balls and one-inch copper piping, rather like the classic model of a DNA spiral, only big and perhaps with wind-chimes. There is a good spot on the lawn, between the alders; but domestic assent is slow. Meanwhile, the buoys line up in rows along the path "to provide", as gardening catalogues say, "winter colour."

Not all the shoreline's plastic catches the eye like this. Look closely among the seaweed at the very top of the tide and you will find tiny, circular pellets of polypropylene in neutral shades of amber and ivory. These ubiquitous fragments, cast up by the billion at the edges of the oceans, are the raw material of the world's plastic forges.

They were first identified for me by a marine biologist, Dr Dan Minchin, whose approach to the tideline is deeply analytical and knowledgeable. He sometimes uses the pellets as a marker for finding tiny drift seeds, which, being of similar buoyancy and size, are cast ashore among them.

THUS, in the latest issue of the scholarly Irish Naturalist's Journal, Dr Miachin and his daughter Caroline (a recent Young Scientist Of The Year) report on their study of the seeds of Lathyrus japonicus. "This is the perennial sea-pea, with Mue-purple flowers, and one of Ireland's rarest coastal plants.

The recent, sparse records of actual plants come from sandy or shingly shores in Kerry, Cork and Wexford, but the 555 seeds picked out by the Minchins (they had to stop somewhere) were collected on 34 shores of the west and south from Ballyheiran Beach in Co Donegal to Carne Beach, Co Wexford.

The relatively big numbers of seeds found on quite small samples of beach suggest that thousands come ashore in Ireland each year - far more than might be produced from the few plants that succeed in growing. This, and the great preponderance of seeds on western and southern coasts suggest they cross the Atlantic from North America. L. japonicus is described as "a cosmopolitan, circumpolar species", common on Canada's east coast and in the "Great Lakes".