And so here we are. It’s May. (“Tra la! It’s May!” sang Guinivere in the musical Camelot. The lusty month of May!) In the over thirty years that I’ve lived in West Cork, the month of May has always been pretty good. Sometimes it’s been spectacular. This time of the year is filled with positive anticipation. The summer is ahead of us, and all memories of rainy, wet Julys are erased by the flowers blooming, the trees coming into leaf and the calves and lambs gambolling around the fields. The fields themselves are growing lush and green at a rate of knots. I also love seeing the newly ploughed and planted fields, full of the promise of harvest.
More than any time of the year, May is about wildness. Now is the time to get out and taste some of that West Cork wildness. I’m lucky. All I have to do is step out the door. We’ve been rewilding since before we knew that’s what it was called. I’ve never been one for manicured lawns and tight herbaceous borders. I prefer a bit of untamed nature with all its messy bits. If you tidy up a fallen tree, all you get is a pile of wood chips. Leave it lying in the woods and after a few years you have an amazing display of mosses, mushrooms and ferns. Not so much a ‘bug hotel’ as a five-star resort for all sorts of wildlife.
To be honest our ‘rewilding’ was also a case of managing a hectare with few resources and little desire to get too complicated. Apart from the vegetable patch, tunnel, and apple orchard, the rest of the land has largely been left to its own devices with selective strimming, keeping unwanted plants like nettles and brambles at bay, while encouraging anything else to have a go. This has led us to have a little a fairyland of West Cork around the house. Best of all, every May we get a new collection. We walk around delighted to see where the foxgloves have decided to assemble or if a huge fern is coming back to life. The regeneration of the back field after ‘Ophelia’ has graced us with sorrel, three-cornered leeks, primroses, blue bells and – this year – wild garlic! Thanks to letting nature do its thing, we get a new ‘collection’ every year. After months indoors, I love going outside and seeing what has popped up this year.
Mind you balancing the wildness is a tricky business. The big problem is keeping ahead of the brambles and nettles. We have managed to keep them at bay in the back, around the apple trees and vegetable patch, but they have basically won in the front field. Over Covid we let the field go and we never really got back on top of it. Last year we had someone valiantly tackle the edges of the field, but it seems to have only encouraged the brambles. Now it looks like Sleeping Beauty’s castle could be buried underneath all the growth. It is impossible to go into the front field without armour and a machete. The only way to deal with it is to get a digger to pull everything out, and to sow meadow grass. The problem is that yet again we didn’t do it back in January/February before it started growing again. Now it’s May and we are looking at a wall of thorns that could deter a zombie horde.
Frankly it doesn’t look good – if you are a human. If you are any other living creature it looks like Disneyland with a free buffet and deli counter. One of the main reasons to rewild is to provide habitat and increase biodiversity. Our front field may be messy, but it certainly attracts wildlife. The number of birds, bugs, small mammals and amphibians is second only to the immense biomass. One can only guess at the richness of the soil, full of creepy crawlies and extensive mushroom network that lies beneath after thirty years of not being sprayed. All that growth is already showing its potential. Though it is still early in the season we are seeing bumblebees, bees, a range of butterflies and other insects buzzing around. The bird life is a twitchers dream, with most Irish native bird species happily hopping about and filling the air with bird song. We can’t rip all that life out now. It would be a sin to destroy such a rich and diverse habitat when nature is in full swing. We will therefore, yet again, let it go wild this summer and try and deal with the front field next winter when the nests are abandoned and the brambles die back. ‘En Mai fait ce qu’il te plait’ is the last line of a French proverb that translates as ‘In May do what pleases you’. For the front field that means: Go wild!
