Y's venerable oaks stand in time's eye

Another Life: It was back in the 1980s that a cigar-box arrived in the post. Inside, cushioned in damp moss, a dozen germinating acorns were sprouting their root-tips, ivory-white. The box was from Douglas Gageby, my editor for 20 years and a man who planted trees.

"Trees, trees, it's always trees," he agreed, throwing in a quote from Walter Scott: "When ye hae nothing else to dae, ye may be aye sticking in a tree. It will be growing when ye're sleeping." There was actually a pair of them - Gageby the hard-pressed, magisterial editor and John Healy or "Backbencher", the acerbic, sometimes-calculatedly-uncouth, political columnist. They could seem a journalistic odd couple: one a quizzical Belfast Protestant and Trinity graduate, the other a professedly hard-nosed chaw from small-town Mayo. Part of the bond was that they really loved nature: it brought perspective to their work and gave them respite from its pressures. Through many political crises, what The Irish Times thought about things was distilled as the two men fished for trout on a midland lake or river.

"He had a broad view of life," wrote Gageby of Healy, "and trees became almost a passion with him". Both men picked up seeds wherever they went - a Healy oak from Strasbourg shares my acre with the cigar-box dozen, while Douglas stuffed his pockets with seeds in Provence. His stone pines in Co Meath bear cones as big as oranges.

The John Healy Forest Park, near Charlestown, commemorates the Mayo man's improbable tree-hugging, along with his totally unsentimental book, Nineteen Acres. Douglas Gageby has no such public memorial, though his passing last week may prompt something of the sort. While Jean Giono's mythical "Man Who Planted Trees" grew a forest by dropping acorns into holes prodded with his walking stick, Gageby's forest is all the thousands of trees planted by readers he prodded, for 15 years, with his daily corner-piece on the Letters to the Editor page.

The idea of "In Time's Eye" was born when he and Healy were fishing on the lovely River Borora, in the Co Meath parish of Moynalty. A string of seven or eight hares ran across their horizon - a remarkable sight.

"We should note that," said Healy.

The title of the corner-piece came from Kipling: "Cities and Thrones and Powers/ Stand in Time's eye/ Almost as long as flowers/ Which daily die." Few readers, probably, caught the deeper message; even fewer knew who was writing the musing, colloquial commentaries on nature, signed simply "Y", the last letter of his last name - all of a piece with his refusal to write in the first person.

"This corner" did, of course, have many more interests than trees. It found time to read widely: The Countryman, Field, Country Life, Horticulture Week, The Dendrologist (trees again), Le Chasseur Français from Gageby's beloved France. He was a dedicated foodie for things natural: honey, mushrooms, quinces, mulberries and herbs, above all. "To make a lively salad you should add about a handful of good, spicy stuff. Say a mixture of winter savory (the king of them all, and an all-the-year-rounder), chervil, parsley, woodruff, salad burnet, borage, lovage, hyssop and some weaker element like lemon balm . . . Then, when some guest rolls a mouthful of salad around and asks just what the flavour is, you have a whole conversation in front of you. If they don't ask, you need not have them back."

He was a watcher of blackbirds and urban foxes: "How lightly they step across your lawn, forelegs lifted as elegantly as trotting ponies or those schooled horses from Vienna (Lippizaners, is it?)." The blitz against badgers could provoke a flash of anger: "How long will it take us to work through and kill them all? And what animal comes next for the slaughter?"

The assaults on our rivers by arterial drainage are followed now by fish kills from farm pollution. Talk of "complete restocking" of a river was nonsense, said Gageby: the blow was to "a whole unseen universe" of water life.

In all this, "Y" occasionally gave way to "H" - John Healy, watching hen-harriers in winter, perched on Achill fence posts, or giving tips on casting flies upon the weedy rivers of July. To read In Time's Eye now (a collection was published by Town House in 2001) is to mourn the seeming lack of any personal feeling for nature at any level among Ireland's people of power.

Meanwhile, in a muggy summer, Douglas's oaks outside our door already show signs of launching their "lammas growth" - a second flush of long shoots and foliage, tinged pinky-orange against insect attack. By the middle of August, they will be dusted over with mildew, which doesn't look as pleasing. But, as Gageby reminded us: "Mildew must be part of the scheme of things . . . Be grateful that you have oaks, and growing well. They are survivors."