If you were a librarian you might be hard put to find the right shelf for this cornucopia of a book. Better, perhaps, to take several copies and scatter them across multiple categories.Even then, you’d be sure to find a page here or there, among 750 of them, that suggests it should be filed somewhere else entirely.
You would start with natural history, obviously. This is a book about plants, after all, by a leading Irish and international botanist, until quite recently a most innovative director of the National Botanic Gardens, and currently president of one of the premier institutions in his field, Missouri Botanic Garden.
Peter Wyse Jackson has also played a major role in mobilising botanic gardens to campaign for the conservation of plants and their habitats across the globe, and this book is infused by a keen awareness that much of what he describes is threatened by environmental degradation, or indeed has already vanished forever. So maybe it should be in the conservation section also. But this is also a book about the “past and present uses of wild plants in Ireland”, and that throws the doors open to interlinking vistas of social, cultural and environmental history.
And plants have names, not just scientific names but common names in English and Irish (often several) and also, as Wyse Jackson leaves nothing out, in Yola – an extinct Wexford dialect – and Shelta, the language of Travellers. Perhaps you should shelve it in lexicography as well.
This might sound like a stew with too many ingredients for any but the specialist reader to digest – and very few people are specialists in all these fields. That could well be a serious problem were it not for Wyse Jackson’s remarkable combination of skills as a writer.
He not only organises the book's diverse parts with a rigorously scientific approach but also binds them together with the sauce of his exuberant personality and broad human experience. Like Robert Lloyd Praeger's The Way That I Went, its text is richly peppered with conversational anecdotes and unexpected diversions. So you might almost have to file it under "memoir" as well.
But in fact, as Wyse Jackson’s introduction makes clear, a really good library would already have a category where all these elements come together.
People and plants
Ethnobotany is the study of the “links and relationships between people, cultures and plants . . . not only the varied uses of plants but how they are thought of culturally”. It helps us not only to understand more about the lifestyles of preindustrial indigenous peoples today but also to map the deep history of the emergence and development of all human cultures, a history that is always linked to botany.
In advanced technoindustrial societies we very easily forget how dependent we were on plants in the past. Worse, we forget how dependent on them we remain in the present, at great risk to our future. From the air we breathe to the food we eat, from medicines to timber, from the textiles that clothe us to the flowers that delight us, plants are the sine qua non of human life.
In 2006, when Wyse Jackson was labelling some plants for an exhibition in Glasnevin, he was amazed to discover that there was no reliable single source of information on our historical use of native plants. Ireland's Generous Nature is his attempt – aptly described as an "epic exploration" by the Irish Times columnist Michael Viney in a brief foreword – to fill the gaps on those labels. Wyse Jackson takes his research very seriously, but he always makes it sound like fun. It took him to the "dark and rather spooky" overgrown garden around the ruined cottage of Biddy Early, the 19th-century "wise woman" (or witch) from Clare who was renowned for her healing potions. He was pleased to find that 22 of the 27 plant species he found there have recorded medicinal uses in Ireland.
It led him to intensify his own lifelong experiments in cooking and gardening with native plants, and it is these passages in particular that make the book so accessible to general readers. In a chatty section advising on jam-making, he advocates an “experimental approach” and concludes: “Remember, if the mixture does not set no matter what you try, you can always pretend that you meant to make syrup all along (and use it as a topping for ice cream and pancakes).”
The heart of the book is a systematic list of wild plants in Ireland, including conifers, ferns, algae and fungi, with accounts of their known uses. These notes are meticulously documented, but often also spiced with personal observations and entertaining digressions. And even the barest information is often fascinating.
The elusive little mountain everlasting is one of the delights of the Burren and Lough Boora. But it adds something to the experience of finding a colony when you learn that it was “formerly chewed or mixed with cobwebs in Co Clare to staunch bleeding from cuts”. In my copy of the book, the list section is already blossoming itself, with a profusion of yellow Post-its marking such entries.
The list is introduced by wide-ranging essays on the general uses of wild (and sometimes cultivated) plants in Ireland – in construction, crafts and children’s games, in cooking, brewing and distilling, in horticulture and in medicine, in warfare and murder, in weaving and dyeing. Wyse Jackson also considers plants as symbols – from the problematic shamrock to the adhesive Easter Lily badges that gave the Official IRA its “Sticky” nickname – and as cosmetics, ornaments and aphrodisiacs.
There is something to surprise every reader in the specifics under each heading. Sometimes it’s simply the lists of archaic implements, or unlikely diseases, rich word hoards that JM Synge or Seamus Heaney might surely have mined to good literary purposes.
Sometimes it’s the prolific detail. Peat, which of course is derived from plant detritus, has several obvious uses, but did you know it was employed to make postcards, wool and even “hot rectal douches” – though the latter are not recorded for Ireland? (Indeed, contemporary foragers for wild food and herbal medicines should note that the author stresses that he does not endorse the efficacy or safety of plant uses in most cases but simply records them.)
Sometimes it’s the provocative analyses, especially on the respective links between the decline of native plant use and the Irish language, the introduction of the potato and its legacy of famine, and the loss of our woodlands.
Beautiful illustrations
All this is presented within a very handsome design, beautifully illustrated with many previously unpublished watercolours by Lydia Shackleton, and the author’s own photographs, although some of the smaller images don’t quite work. Like almost every book published today, this one could profitably have spent more time with an editor, but, for its scale, it is remarkably free of repetition and typographical errors.
Wyse Jackson is the first to admit that his work, vast though it is, remains radically incomplete. Traditional knowledge, transmitted orally by the very poor largely through a language suffering a chronic decline, “survives only as a shadowy hint and fleeting reminder of a rich plant lore that has been lost”.
In this book, however, it has found not only a worthy monument but also a rallying point to stimulate renewed interest and further study.
Paddy Woodworth's most recent book is Our Once and Future Planet: Restoring the World in the Climate Change Century
