Michael Viney

The song thrush joins me half an hour before dawn, perching on the bare, topmost branch of the hawthorn outside my workroom window. He sings steadily(...)

According to folklore, you shouldn’t pick blackberries after Michaelmas (September 29th) because they will be bitter, the devil having spit on them to(...)

How totally terrific are your tomatoes this year? The reason I ask is that the utterly splendiferous annual event that is the Totally Terrific Tomato(...)

Eileen Battersby, the late Irish Times literary correspondent, who died on Sunday, December 23rd, after a car crash in Co Meath, was renowned for both(...)

When this column began in October, 40 years ago, the acre had scraggy hawthorns leaning from the ditch, a big, wild willow sprawled across the stream (...)

A column that brackets a hare with a spider could hint at an echo of an Aesop fable, but when both are invasive aliens to Ireland, facts are what we n(...)

All summer, fresh images of Irish wildlife have appeared in the inbox of “Eye on Nature”, often through capture with smartphones that are also cameras(...)

Our young beech tree, clearly drunk on excess CO2, flings its branches ever skyward. But the yew inside the gate pursues its destiny with measured con(...)

The Irish Times columnist, environmentalist and natural-history author Michael Viney was among 18 people whose election to the Royal Irish Academy was(...)

G et people talking about the ritual observances of the good old days, and sooner or later the topic of milk will rise to the surface. Oh yes, we te(...)