The first orange-tip butterfly of summer came tapping at the flower buds of a clump of ox-eye daisies as if incredulous at finding them still closed on such a ravishing day. Back and back it came, probing at the tight-clenched petals of one bud after another, then circling the greenhouse before trying them all again (this, it must be said, within an easy flutter of a bed of pink geranium in full nectar-flow, seething with bumble-bees and white butterflies of the green-veined, down-market sort). The orange-tip, for reasons of its own, came calling just a week too early.
By today, Leucanthemum vulgare is bringing a white-and-gold shimmer to drier corners of our garden and to roadside banks. But nowhere, not even the most unspoiled of meadows, will equal the most spectacular floral vision of my life: a whole, vast field of ox-eye daisies, dazzling as snow between the lush hawthorn hedgerows of Co Meath.
This great sowing was at Sean Boylan's herb-farm at Dunboyne and it offered a striking image for Ioclann na mBβnta the series on traditional herbal medicine that Ethna and I made for TG4, which was repeated earlier this month. A day in these scented fields, in drying-sheds spread with hawthorn-blossom, in dark barns heaped with sacks breathing burdock, mullein and valerian, helped to lead us to a fresh dimension of living with nature.
I have reason to appreciate the potent and precise ingenuity of much allopathic (conventional) medicine and have not had to call on the more earnest of herbal interventions. But at the gentler margins of well-being, the power of plants to liberate the body's energies and mollify the aches of age has been one of the great benefits of making - or letting - things grow.
Our own wild patches of ox-eye flowers are now protected, not merely for their summer brilliance, but for infusion in what we call "pick-me-up tea", a beverage first sampled amid the stainless-steel vats of Dunboyne.
Its chief ingredient, however, is lovage, the powerfully yeasty and aromatic herb that Sean Boylan rears by the acre and that rises like clumps of majestic celery in a corner beside our compost-bins.
"Pick-me-up tea", for lethargy, stress and tiredness, may or may not be what Boylan pours at half-time into the frequently heroic Meath football team, of which he is manager. For us senior linespeople, it is a welcome elixir: sweetened with fruit-juice, that gives a second round of energy at about 4p.m.Such "feelgood" herbs can offer pleasantly medieval ways of celebrating summer. Sweet wood ruff, for example, is a delicate little plant (its whorls of leaves rather like cleavers, but without the Velcro hooks) that creeps through the shade of woods and in May is covered with starry little white flowers. The leaves are strongly fragrant (especially when left to wilt) and smell of coumarin, the compound that also gives new-mown hay its distant hint of vanilla. Steeped for a couple of hours in a bottle of not-too-special Chardonnay, it imparts to the wine not only its distinctive bouquet but something "to make a man merry", as the herbalist, Gerard put it.
Lemon balm, with or without the wine, was another staple of medieval cordials, intended to soothe the nerves and "make the heart merry" (according to the great Muslim physician, Avicenna). We grow bushes of it and infuse its leaves in boiling water, sometimes with lovage: the scent alone is a promise of comfort.Some of the medicinally most valuable herbs are really quite insignificant. Who would think that cleavers, for example, (sometimes goosegrass or sticky willie) is one of the leading "cleansing" herbs, or that parsley-piert, one of the lowliest, most non-descript of small and hairy roadside annuals, is a prime traditional remedy for inflammation of motor-nerves and muscles? Sean Boylan grows roods of parsley-piert and uses this "kind and gentle plant", together with cleavers, ox-eye-daisy and burdock flowers, against arthritis.I have taken another route, impressed by a Kerry accordion-player who, his hands knotted with arthritis, turned to a local folk-remedy. The flowers and leaves of yarrow, the white-topped umbellifer of hedgebanks, simmer into a bitter brew, but it gave the accordionist back his music, and now, I believe, helps keep my own fingers from seizing up.
It is ironic the revival of herbal medicine has been led by the cities and from Europe, while rural Irish folk remedies have declined through what Cyril ╙ Ceir∅n saw as "a false gentility". He found the midland counties the richest in knowledge of herbs (Sean Boylan's inheritance runs through five generations) and the west the least productive.
In Britain, the use of wild plants has inspired some major cultural projects: Richard Mabey's magnificent Flora Britannica, in 1996, an encyclopedia of living plant folklore and modern observations and Flora Celtica, a millennium project mounted by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. Along with a travelling exhibition and a touring primary school roadshow, the core of Flora Celtica is an interactive database of native plants and their uses from every corner of Scotland.
Now that our National Botanic Gardens are waking up to a wider cultural role, can we hope that they might gather traditional knowledge as a part of putting Ireland's plants on-line?
