Another Life/Michael Viney:Some time last spring - perhaps the Easter holiday - a car with a Northern numberplate braked sharply beside our front fuchsia hedge (it can get a bit blind there) and a black seed the size of a small ballbearing sprang out of a muddy wheel-arch and into the long, moist grass of the bank.
All right, I'm guessing, but something like that must account for the lovely cluster of pink flowers, ankle-high, that took my eye as I came home from my walk the other morning. They rested beside my porridge-bowl as mysterious and exotic as a spray of orchids. But dim intuitions steered me to a page in Webb's Irish Flora, propped against the bread bin. No pictures, but all the right words, especially "Sepals 3, petal-like, the lowest in the form of a broad pouch . . ." The pouch has given Impatiens glandulifera one English common name, policeman's helmet. I'd rather have the sensuous start of a poem by Anne Stevenson: "Orchid-lipped, loose-jointed, purplish, indolent flowers, with a ripe smell of peaches, like a girl's breath through lipstick." Or you could take the word of sundry websites that, however voluptuous, Himalayan balsam is one of the world's most aggressive weeds, spreading fast across Europe, New Zealand and North America.
It was introduced first to Kew Gardens in 1839 and taken up as a Victorian garden flower - the tallest annual around (even taller than nettles). But its seed-pods exploded at a touch, firing seeds up to seven metres, thus ensuring its escape into the wild. It marched into wet, damp places and along river-banks - slowly at first; then, from the end of the century, with gathering speed.
In Northern Ireland, by the late 1930s, it had staked out a corner of Lough Neagh and a few stretches of the Lagan, but Ireland's leading botanist, Robert Lloyd Praeger, still saw it as "only an incipient colonist". Today, the northeast of the island is its fiefdom, borne out in the number of red dots it earns in the massive New Atlas of the Flora of Britain and Ireland. "Extremely common," confirms Stewart & Corry's Flora of the North-East of Ireland, "and apparently a permanent member of the river and lakeside flora, spreading even to the Copeland Islands." In urban Belfast, it even thrives on dry, hard ground.
In Dublin, it's abundant along the banks of the Liffey from Chapelizod to Lucan. It's also along the Shannon Estuary and some river valleys in Cork and the southeast. In Mayo there's not much, but outposts at Achill, Mulranny and the Mullet. And now Thallabawn, if I let that last flower on the plant go to seed.
Himalayan balsam is beautiful, and bumblebees, apparently, go mad for its nectar. It's not toxic to human skin, like giant hogweed, which also grows huge along rivers. It's not a stubborn, rhizomatous perennial, like Japanese knotweed, though it does form the same kind of tall "bamboo" thicket, smothering native competitors and then leaving the riverbank bare (and thus prone, say its opponents, to erosion). Nor does it claim a whole landscape, as great clumps of gunnera ("giant rhubarb") are trying to do around the corner in Killary Harbour and along the roads of north Connemara.
Nobody says a bad word about Fuchsia magellanica "Riccartonii", the rampant Scottish hybrid at whose feet the little balsam plant has burst into bloom. Fuchsia is the west's great shelter-shrub, like that other South American, escallonia. Without a maze of windbreak fuchsia hedges, grown from twigs just stuck into the ground, I should never have raised our vegetables or trees. On the other hand, a tangle of fuchsia now chokes the stream-banks in the Hollow, once an airy dell for ducks and beehives.
Nor have I heard any protests at the exponential spread of naturalised monbretia, the other alien hybrid that sets our wayside banks and verges so wonderfully aflame in early autumn. It, too, is smothering native biodiversity, metre by metre, with its proliferating thousands of little bulbs. But, as Sylvia Reynolds accepted in her recent Catalogue of Alien Plants in Ireland, montbretia, like the sycamore, has become a characteristic plant in the Irish landscape.
"Alien plants," she writes, "now form an important part of the country's biological diversity" - and goes on to assess the current standing of some 920 species, past and present - almost equal to the number of our natives.
In the face of such invasions, we have to pick our battlegrounds - waging war on rhododendron, for example, where it chokes our native woodlands, and having balsam-bashing weekends where its thickets threaten plants we ought to keep. As to all the fuss about ragwort, that Irish-speaking native weed, let's be honest: it's not the poison, just the horrid, football-jersey shade of yellow.
Eye On Nature
I squashed an earwig and what I thought were its intestines turned out to be a worm emerging from its abdomen.
Ruth Murphy, Chambers Park, Kilcock, Co Kildare
It was the larva of an ichneumon fly, which is a parasite on the insect.
There is a wasps' nest in the breeze block wall separating our garden from our neighbours. The wasps access the nest through a hole in the mortar. What is the most humane way of removing the nest, as we have two young children.
Andrew Bowers, Dundrum,
Dublin 16
The wasps will leave the nest any day now and not return to it.
I have always found the Twelve Bens largely devoid of wildlife but recently winged and unwinged ants had found their way to the summit of Derryclare along with numerous skittering meadow pipits, perhaps attracted by the ants.
Michael Lunt, Dublin 4
The ants were on their mating flight.
Michael Viney welcomes observations sent to him at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo; e-mail: viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address