ANOTHER LIFE: An e-mail from the island on March 3rd - "Gustin has just heard the lark" - reassured me that spring still knows where it's wanted, can still talk to people with an ear for more than the twitter of a mobile phone.
Looking out through showers and rainbows to the island blurred on the horizon, I let the Inishbofin lark sing in my mind for a while, strident and sweet above the surf. On the mainland, larks seem to be waiting for warmer days among the dunes and shore fields, but my own spring signals have been hoisted on cue - in particular the flowers that enchanted my childhood.
The lesser celandine that lit up the February moss of an old town churchyard in Sussex opens now in brilliant, brassy sheets below our unkempt hawthorn-banks. Its brittle tubers can make it a weed for town gardeners, but here in Mayo it is welcome to grab all the damp soil it can, if only for this glorious, gaudy shock of gold at the very start of spring.
There is one patch of ground on the acre, just a few metres square, so well-drained, sheltered and tilted to the south that it soaks up the sun's radiation. This is where the dog goes to lie, and where the first red admiral butterfly will settle; on the bank nearby bloom the first primroses of spring. On the day of the Inishbofin lark-song, I picked half a dozen, stems barely long enough for finger and thumb.
"Take a few primroses in a glass," mused Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal, "and the instress of - brilliancy, sort of starriness: I have not the right word - so simple a flower gives is remarkable. It is, I think, due to the strong swell given by the deeper yellow middle." "Instress" was a word Hopkins coined for the force and presence of natural things that goes beyond their mere appearance.
The little cluster of flowers trying not to drown in a Waterford posy-pot on my desk insist on being looked at: they shine out before everything, their petals full of light.
They also insist on being smelled - a perfume like the ideal, unattainable air-freshener, and so direct and distinctive it connects at once with memory - cycling alone to the birchwoods of the Sussex Weald: dead branches crumpling; shoes squishing into mud; greedy bunches bound with wool and lashed to the handlebars.
Over much of these islands, the primrose is reckoned a woodland flower, blooming early (prima rosa, the year's "first rose") to catch the light before the trees shade it out. Where woods are coppiced, the clearing can produce a profusion of flowers like Donne's "terrestrial galaxie". But in the west of Britain and Ireland, the greater cloud-cover and higher rainfall lets the primrose colonise hedgerows, field banks and even sand-dunes.
So, while the plant probably arrived in Ireland with the early, post-glacial birchwoods, the moisture of the full oceanic climate let it follow every boreen to the shore.
To take pleasure in a primrose needs not a scrap of science, but no botany book will let you away without knowing about pin-eyed and thrum-eyed flowers. Primroses may look identical, but two kinds are necessary to its breeding biology and their seeds are usually set only when the two "morphs" cross with each other.
Peer closely into the rich yellow circle at the heart of a primrose, target of long-tongued bees and moths, and you will see what is meant. In the pin-eyed flowers, the greenish head of the style - the female reproductive organ - reaches up to the golden mouth of the tube, while the anthers - the male parts, with the pollen - stay below. In thrum-eyed flowers, it is the anthers that poke up and the style that hides half-way down.
Since nature must have her exceptions, there is a wood by a river in north Co Dublin in which occasional, "homomorphic" primroses have been found which are neither pin nor thrum but have style and anthers of the same length - an extremely rare phenomenon in either island.
Does picking primroses do any harm? In Britain, where both picking pressures and conservation sentiment are strong, the matter has been tested in some detail.
Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica, tells of a Devon paper-mill group which, as a PR gesture, posted bunches of fresh-picked primroses to all its valued customers, a company tradition that began decades before. In 1978 alone, some 1.3 million blooms were mailed out, picked on contract from just a few farms in the South Hams district.
Concerned by adverse publicity, the company brought in a team of ecologists, who found the picking carefully organised, just a few, immature blooms from each plant, and the three-week operation something of a local festival. It was, the team concluded, no serious biological threat, especially since individual plants seemed to have a life of between 15 and 25 years.
In Ireland, there is little need to worry about primrose-picking or the looting of wild plants for gardens, but much reason for helpless concern about the loss of old banks and hedgerows in road-widening. It may be that Primula vulgaris will eventually finds its way back into some re-made verges, especially in the west, but the exact conditions of many partially-shaded sites may never be reproduced and pollution from increased traffic seems bound to change the chemistry of the soil.
A few years ago, friends brought us a cowslip plant retrieved from the wayside debris of a major road-widening in the midlands. With the Burren in mind, we planted it into the limestone chippings that surface our "street".
It has flourished there, self-seeding in all directions and hybridising with the vividly-coloured polyanthus flowers nearby. So, just as many people find pink primroses springing up around their gardens, we now have the first red cowslips in Thallabawn, if not all Ireland.