ANOTHER LIFE/Michael Viney: For some years now, the plastic-lined garden pond has given clear notice of its intention to become first a fen, and then a bog. Each autumn, the task of cutting away the plants that hide the water and dragging them out to drain at the rim (so that froglets, nymphs and beetles get a chance to plop back in) becomes more back-breaking and futile.
If I had wanted a pond of shimmering water with a few, choice reflections, reliably inhabited each spring by orgiastic frogs and beautifully sun-dappled newts, I should have gone easy on the plants - rooting a few of them, perhaps, in crates isolated on a gravel bottom. As it was, I went for the whole "wild" ecosystem, lining the bottom with mud and furnishing the pond with chunks of vegetation (together with their insects, nymphs and eggs) brought from nearby streams and lakes.
Within a year or two, the pond was a picture from a wildlife book, especially in Spring, when pink-and-white bogbean and golden marsh marigold lorded it above a bustle of aquatic life, skimming around on the surface or gliding into view in the depths.
But what I had succeeded in creating - faking, if you like - was a pond at one stage in its life: an ecosystem already well on its way to becoming something different. It is every pond's ambition to fill itself in as dry land. Depending on the arrival of plants, the supply of nourishment and the climate, this can happen in a lifetime, or take centuries, but the story of natural succession is the same.
Charming as they are, aquatic wildflowers such as bog-bean ramify into colonies with a network of rhizomes. Springing among them come the jointed spires of marsh horsetail and needle-sharp rushes, all with abundant rhizomes, spores and seeds. In high summer, when everything stands high, the effect can seem lush and exotic, but by November it has all collapsed into a sad mattress interwoven with floating grasses and moss.
This is the stuff of humus that slowly fills in the pond and invites a new succession of plants. In the moist Co Mayo climate, these will, I hope, eventually include the sphagnum mosses, the bog-builders that finish up by feeding from the rain. By giving up, at last, on a laborious autumn chore, I can at least use the excuse of an experiment.
In the meantime, the bogs have put on a mantle of colour that is this island's fall glory: a smouldering palette of coppery reds, madders, russets that glow all the brighter for autumn storms and rain. No better time could have been chosen for the launch of Celebrating Boglands, the book that marks 20 years of achievement by the Irish Peatland Conservation Council.
In any study of the effectiveness of NGOs, the record of the IPCC would have to be reckoned as outstanding. Along with a badger-toothed grip on its conservation aims, it has brought about a cultural change that few would have reckoned possible just a couple of decades ago. From "wastelands" for which some human use must be found, the bogs are now granted an intrinsic worth as ecosystems of fascination and beauty, especially among the young. A concentration on education, school books and teaching kits has found its reward, helped by the ready and imaginative response of so many teachers.
The great range of contributors in the new book demonstrates how deeply, indeed, the bogs have engaged with Irish culture, in science and art, poetry, social history. A poem by Seamus Heaney and a memoir by Seamus Caulfield both show a gritty sensibility towards the bog as a matrix of Irish rural life. Paintings by Pauline Bewick and others are matched by some superlative photographs of peatland, its fauna and flora, many by Peter Foss, the IPCC's chairman.
Especially revealing, I think, are reminders of how the IPCC began, building on the enthusiasm engendered by Father John Moore, the Jesuit professor of botany in UCD, and the Dutch professor and conservationist, Matthijs Schouten. As Schouten recalls in the book, it was their joint and unexpected success in saving Mongan Bog, near Clonmacnoise, that was the basic inspiration for the subsequent "battle of the bogs".
A newer battle (if that's what it has to be) lies in gaining happy access to them - at least to the blanket bogs of the mountains and especially to those of the western counties. This happens to be the UN International Year of the Mountains, to which Ireland's chief contribution is a conference in the Sligo Institute of Technology (from November 21st to 23rd) called: The Creation of Partnerships in Ireland's Upland Regions, hosted by the Mountaineering Council of Ireland.
Co Sligo has seen some ugly confrontation between farmers and hikers, so anything that can change that miserable mood is very welcome. This conference follows a similar one in Galway in 1995, from which sprang the success of the Wicklow Uplands Council, with its "stakeholder" consultation and co-operation. From that experience, and that of partnership in the Mourne Mountains, come ways of managing conflict and finding a balance in upland development.
Both models, together with partnerships-in-the-making on both sides of the border, will be used to address regional problems in a series of workshops (among them, no doubt, the progress in remedies for sheep overgrazing).
Celebrating Boglands, a 120-page hardback, is available from IPCC, 119 Capel Street, Dublin 1. €37 including p & p.
For details of The Creation of Partnerships in Ireland's Upland Regions conferencecontact Mountaineering Council of Ireland. Tel: 01-4507376/website: www.mountaineering.ie