Of grave concerns

During August, when aunts come visiting from the US, radio chat shows are wrenched around to the topic of overgrown graveyards: you could tell the time of year by this alone. When grasses and wildflowers start sagging and seeding, these assiduous relatives insist, in totally unsuitable footwear, on rummaging for the family headstones.

American graveyards, as we know from innumerable films, are immaculately tended hillsides, with enough smooth lawn around each grave to allow the full photocall of mafia mob, millionaire's kin or Pentagon brass. Irish graveyards, especially those on an intimate, rural scale, are often more like informal nature reserves, which is how they should be.

As a small-city child in love with flowers, it was my pleasure to take a small bucket up to the flint-walled churchyard on top of the hill and fill it with golden dandelion-heads for my mother to make the Christmas wine.

The dandelions grew most thickly around the oldest tombs, those like great chests of white stone, and thus established in my mind a charming nexus of transcendence, renewal and recycling (before that term was in fashion). In Ireland, in August, a thicket of graveyard briars will offer juicy blackberries, to be enjoyed in much the same contemplative spirit.

To think of such places as nature reserves is not entirely fanciful. Where they are truly old and adjoin an abbey, or some such, they may literally have preserved their plants over centuries. The pellitory growing on the walls at Ballintubber Abbey here in Mayo, for example, has certainly renewed itself each spring for more than 200 years, and possibly 600.

At Corcomroe Abbey in the Burren, the decorative stone carvings of medicinal herbs were finished in about 1210, which makes them the earliest botanical carvings in western Europe: the tradition of Irish monastery gardens is a long one. Churchyard yews, on the other hand, may lend a quite spurious air of antiquity. Clones of the upright Irish yew go back no more than 250 years, when the fastigiate, reach-for-the-sky form was discovered on a limestone crag on the Fermanagh side of Cuilcagh mountain. Most graveyard yews, indeed, are no older than the church beside them.

But a graveyard does not need to be ancient to have botanical value. Simply by being walled off from farmland or suburbia, it can preserve grasses and meadow plants that have been extirpated for miles around: nothing, perhaps, actually "rare", just those that are steadily disappearing (cowslips, for example). This year I left the grass unmown at the gable and was reminded of what used to grow in the old pasture: a mass of golden hawksbeard, wild carrot, self-heal, ox-eye daisies (also, I have to say, rather too much ragwort, redeemed by the red admiral butterflies which come to it for nectar).

Part of the problem in leaving a graveyard unmown is that the modern, glossy-granite headstones are so utterly out of sympathy with nature and its processes. Wild herbage offends their essentially suburban geometry. Give me a limestone headstone, please, like those of old graveyards in Co Clare. It will grow a brocade of grey and white lichens, and look right when leaves, untended, brush against it and cast shadows on it. Raindrops will soften the edges of my name.

A nature reserve suggests wildlife, and a decently leafy graveyard, undisturbed at night by alcopop parties, can offer refuge to hedgehogs, at least. It also has its own distinctive insect habitats. Woodlice, for example, abound in them. They include a rosy-red woodlouse, Androniscus dentiger which is found most frequently in old, limestone Protestant churchyards of the John Betjeman sort.

Also present are jumping spiders, which stalk flies across sunny walls like cats, and then pounce, while the little black-and-white "zebra" spider, Salticus scenicus, is one that children notice while waiting for Gran.

As for the grass, Walt Whitman considered it "the beautiful uncut hair of graves". He did not expect to be woken by a motor-mower.

In my recent column, headed "Thatcher in the Rye" (August 2nd), I wrote about a grant from the Heritage Council intended to help secure the traditional growing of rye, for thatching, on Inis Meain in the Aran Islands. I pointed out the irony of a couple on Inis Mor being refused a local authority thatching grant for a new restaurant and B & B because they were using island rye-straw rather than "long-lasting" reed from the Shannon.

I now learn that the Heritage Council is setting up a working group to review thatch in the State and brought a number of thatchers to Kilkenny to sort out the important issues. They agreed that the choice of what to thatch with - wheat, oat or rye straw, or reed - is less important than the quality of the material, the pitch of the roof and the skill of the thatcher. Quality can be very variable, depending on seed origins, the growing and fertilising methods, and how and when the straw is harvested. Even the Shannon reed, apparently, may be suffering from an over-abundance of nutrients in the river.

"It should make sense," says the Heritage Council chairperson, Freda Rountree, "to work to a situation where thatching material is locally produced. Ultimately, thatch has to be able to compete on cost with any other roofing material, if it is to survive other than as a museum piece."