Another Life: Meditating in a tent in an east Greenland wilderness all of 17 summers ago, I promised myself roses back at Thallabawn. Drifts of brilliant Arctic flowers, lighting up a landscape of raw grey rock and gravel, made me hungry for some sybaritic scent and colour on an acre then still windswept and largely bare of anything that didn't promise food.
Today, in a June so splendidly floriferous that even RTÉ is urging viewers out of doors to enjoy the waysides and hedgerows, our shrubby roses have made great mounds of blossom, one of which is fully five metres high and smothers the ESB pole in a creamy, fragrant cascade. This, along with our equally rampageous young trees, makes the acre an exotically vegetated precinct in the middle of a hillside of sheep-pastures.
All over the hard-grazed west, wherever blow-ins like ourselves have been settled for a while, you will find such anomalously verdant plots, at odds with the bleak aprons of grass that surround most indigenous bungalows. For most younger settlers, creating - and working in - a leafy, flower-filled Arcadia has usually been part of the dream.
Jane Stanley, from the UK, prospecting Co Mayo with her husband, rejected offers of fields on the north side of Nephin, on banks of rivers liable to flooding and in the middle of bogs. She settled finally, a dozen years ago, for a house and a thistly two-acre field in the limestone drumlins of mid-Mayo, and began to subdue it for a garden, not with herbicide but with old carpets and layers of newspapers.
While she waited, she gardened in gravel. As bare soil became available it was planted, not from instant, nursery stock, but with perennials, shrubs and trees mostly grown from seed. To stroll today beneath her hand-sown silver birches is to wonder all over again about the special empathy possessed by green-fingered women. Frogswell Nursery and Garden has become a rare west-of-Shannon destination for the serious hunter of unusual plants, many of which were raised from seed swapped with other gardeners and botanic gardens round the world.
As Jane confesses on her website (www.frogswell.com), she began with many failures, not least with seeds she brought back from a trip to the Himalayas. Like us all, she grew tired of gazing hopefully for months into flowerpots crusting over with moss: now she daren't use a hoe, for fear of wiping out a swathe of self-sown treasures.
Her Internet guru ("he has changed my life") has been an American chemistry professor, one Norm Deno, whose books start from the premise that "Every species has some mechanism for delaying germination until after the seed has been dispersed". All one needs is to spread the seed on damp kitchen towel and work out the treatment that unlocks its growth. Deno has worked patiently through some 4,000 species and deploys all manner of temperature shifts and light regimes, or dousing with boiling water or gibberellic acid, or even a year in the fridge. Jane's fridge is always full of seeds, but she has only to show you a whole tray of tiny, feathery, Japanese maples to convey the satisfaction of coaxing them into growth.
Frogswell Nursery and Garden is near Straide, on the Castlebar-Foxford road, and is open by prior appointment (frogswell@utvinternet.com or tel: 094-9031420).
I have written here about the massive New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora, first published in 2002, which mapped the range and state of well-being of all our countryside plants. A great deal of voluntary effort and expert fieldwork went into it, not least from the professional and amateur botanists in Ireland's branch of the Botanical Society of the British Isles. As a baseline for measuring future change it is a monumental piece of work, and to mention that it hadn't any pictures seemed petty indeed.
Now, I am delighted to say, the maps on its 900 pages, plus another thick bookful of plant descriptions and identification tools, plus more than 8,500 colour photographs and line drawings, are all magically compounded into one thin DVD-ROM disc.
The Interactive Flora of the British Isles is a digital encyclopedia in which one can hop back and forth between 3,500 species, including all native and naturalised plants and even the crops in the fields. Click on one 10 kilometre square of a map of Ireland and up comes a list of its plants. Or click on a plant name and see how widely it grows. Whether for conservation management, student use or simple amateur pleasure, this is a brilliant use of "bioinformatics". It can be ordered online for a modest £30, plus £3 postage and packing, from www.etiis.org.
Finally, for the flower-filled holiday anywhere from Portugal to Turkey, Wild Flowers of the Mediterranean keys Marjorie Blamey's paintings to text by Christopher Grey-Wilson in a field guide just heavy enough in your bag to test how seriously inquisitive you are. Published by A & C Black, it costs £16.99.