LETTER FROM COLONSAY:First imported in the mid-18th century, rhododendrons are now rampant in some parts
BRONISLAW IS halfway up a steep hillside on the Scottish island of Colonsay, slashing at a dense thicket of rhododendrons.
“All day we cut the bushes,” he says. “For month after month.”
Bronislaw and his three Polish co-workers are what are described as “rhody bashers” – part of a small army fighting to stem the advance of the purple-flowered rhododendron ponticum across the west of Scotland.
Colonsay, nine miles long and about three miles wide, lies about 35 miles out into the Atlantic from the port town of Oban on the Scottish mainland.
It has a resident population of about 100, a small hotel and shop, a bookshop, sheep, cattle and plenty of rhododendrons.
The Poles have been contracted in to try to stem the triffid-like colonisation of the island by the rhododendrons. It’s a tough job. The tangle of bushes and trees – some plants are more than 20 feet tall – is tackled first with chainsaws and machetes, the branches burned in large pyres. Then the stumps and roots are sprayed.
“The rhododendrons were gradually creeping about the landscape but no one really noticed what was happening until relatively recently,” says Lord Strathcona, whose estate controls most of Colonsay.
“Then they suddenly seemed to explode, taking over large amounts of land. The trouble is they don’t seem to have any natural predator to control them: what the scientists really need to come up with is some breed of sheep that could eat away at the leaves without keeling over.”
Strathcona is a genial man in his mid-80s, moving tentatively along after a bad fall and surgery. I’m invited in for coffee in his modest cottage: his son now lives in the big house.
“Donald Smith, my great-grandfather, was rather good at making money. Though born in Scotland he lived a lot of his life in Canada, where he made one fortune by clever investments in the Hudson’s Bay Company, then another through building railways across the country. Later, when he became a major shareholder in what was then the Anglo-Persian Oil Company – now BP – he persuaded the British navy to switch from coal- to oil-fired ships, so making his third fortune.
Along the way Queen Victoria granted Smith the peerage of Strathcona and Mount Royal, or Montreal. In settlement of a £50,000 debt owed to him by Colonsay’s previous owners, Smith took ownership of the island’s lands in the early years of the last century. The present Lord Strathcona inherited the estate in 1959, by which time Colonsay House’s gardens, mostly planted in the 1930s, had one of Scotland’s finest collection of rhododendrons.
Rhododendron ponticum was first imported from Europe in the mid-18th century, becoming popular on big estates in Britain and Ireland as shelter for pheasants and other birds.
“We used to have avenues of it in the estate’s gardens,” says Strathcona. “Visitors would admire all the purple blooms. Then, at some point, it must have hopped over the wall and begun its march up the hillsides.”
Colonsay was one of the first places in Scotland to tackle the rhododendron invasion through various schemes funded nationally and by the EU and there’s a feeling on the island that the plant has now at least been controlled, if not eradicated completely. In other areas, including the neighbouring islands of Jura and Mull, the rhododendron continues its onward march.
Andrew Abrahams lives on the southern tip of Colonsay. At low tide you can drive a car across the sand to his house. At other times it’s an hour’s walk along the shore, the calls of Canada geese and oyster-catchers echoing across the sands and shingle. Andrew has lived on the island for nearly 40 years, keeping bees and running an oyster business.
“The future of the island has got to be its wildlife, tied in with tourism. Visitors might like to see the rhododendrons in flower but just imagine if there was nothing else here – it’s not a pleasant thought.”
Tradition has it that in the 6th century St Columba, after various battles with his fellow monks in Ireland, left for Scotland, first arriving on Oronsay, a small island just across the bay from Andrew’s house.
“It is related of St Columba that before he left Ireland he made a vow never to settle within sight of his native hills and discovering that he could still see them from the Beinn [hill] in Oransay, he moved to Iona,” says an old guide book.
The rain beats against the windowpanes. The mist is rolling in from the Atlantic. If St Columba managed to see the hills of Donegal from here he must have been lucky with the weather. And he didn’t have to contend with clumps of rampant rhododendrons.