ANOTHER LIFE: As the days dwindle down into their flaming tea-time sunsets, grass gets fewer hours in which to grow. December brings the sheep nudging closer, testing our fences on all three sides to peer after tantalizing glimpses of ungrazed green. On too many mornings just lately, we have been joined at breakfast by the same three or four ewes, munching across the lawn, writes Michael Viney.
Ushered gently, sheep will supposedly go back the way they came, showing at once where repair must be made. On an acre fringed with earth banks, ragged hawthorn, briars and fuchsia thickets and mazed with hedges and trees, the retreat becomes confused, even frenetic, as holes I have definitely fixed become the ewes' inexorable, head-first objective the next time I drive them to escape.
Such evictions have led me into corners I have not visited for years, led on by wisps of wool and leafy, sheep-sized tunnels. An acre may not seem much in which to make discoveries, but the calculated neglect of our bird-friendly lives, confining vegetable beds and paths to a chain of sheltered, Neolithic clearings, has left room for some surprise.
One is how a few years of untrammelled growth - well, a decade or so - can allow young trees to stick out stout branches horizontally, like those modern steel-bar turnstiles that can make men nervous. Ask someone to draw a broadleaf tree and out comes some sort of bare-trunked lollipop, such is the general impact of browsing animals and park superintendents. But oaks, alders and sycamores are just three of the trees that, left alone, claim their full cone of growth from the ground up.
A second wonder is the sheer length attained by a questing briar with access to fertile ground. Years ago, seduced by a small ad in an "alternative" magazine, I sent off for some roots of what was promised to be a superlative blackberry bramble, far more productive than anything our own banks could provide (full marks to some desperate settler's initiative).
Its one superior quality has been its vigour, almost aspiring to that of the Himalayan Rosa gigantea, which throws out arching, thorny stems 20 metres long. Even our own, local species of Rubus will snake through the grass to a length of three or four metres, or cast its grapnels over those same low branches, dragging them cruelly down.
Brambles root at the tip and then arch on again in several directions the following summer, so that one plant can clone itself into an entire thicket.
Introduced to New Zealand, blackberries became one of the country's worst weeds, giving rise to the story that there were just two plants - one smothering North island, the other the South.
Their progress on our acre, however popular with butterflies and blackbirds, has clearly exceeded their brief, and since I am assured the word "mattock" is not in the catalogue of Irish tools, a winter of slow spadework seems in prospect.
A more productive revelation of the acre's no-go areas is the sheer biomass and girth attained by ageing fuchsia, the west's most ebullient and colourful alien. Clipped back three or four times a year and allowed to rise only slowly, fuchsia has given me head-high windbreak hedges solidly meshed from the ground up. But allowed to follow its own nature, it becomes a quite different shrub.
A look at the map for Fuchsia magellanica in the New Atlas of British and Irish Flora shows that the shrub grows across a surprisingly large proportion (about half) of this island - the whole of west Cork and Kerry and a broad margin round the western, northern and southern coasts. It stretches through western Scotland and flourishes even in Orkney and Shetland.
The first plants were brought to these islands from Chile in 1788, but almost all of the fuchsia that grows in western hedges today is cloned from a cultivar that arose in a nursery in Riccarton in Scotland some time before 1850 (hence the full name Fuchsia magellanica Riccartonii). It had escaped to the wild by 1857.
The cultivar is sterile - it sets no seed - and spreads by suckering: that is, it sprawls or gets blown down and puts out new roots where its prostrate branches touch the soil. The Knight of Kerry planted one bush at Glanleam on windswept Valencia Island in 1854. By 1870 its circumference was nearing 120 feet and by 1905 over 290 feet, which brought it to the cliff edge.
In my own thickets, spreading from twigs that were stuck in the ground to make hedges, many of the boughs are as thick as my arm and three or four metres long. Playing woodsman with a bush-saw, I am felling enough fuchsia to fuel the stove for a winter. It's a hardwood with a bright purple sap, and, dried for a year, will burn with a fine heat.
It's amazing how few trees, how little land, will give the soothing feeling of a wood. A curving trail between branches, a clearing soft with leafmould, the sounds of invisible birds, invisible wind - all contrive a splendidly healing illusion: Thoreau's Walden, just beyond the cabbage patch.