Another Life Michael VineyI almost forgot to sow the garlic again. As one of the few useful things one can do in a soggy garden in late autumn, it ought to be a ritual of pagan faith enacted ahead of the equinox: an annual pact with spring, all that. Or just good botany. Garlic grows its roots and leaves in the shorter days of the year, finishing up a whole month ahead of onions.
Many of my 100 cloves, broken out from last summer's harvest of bulbs (and surely a magical number) were already beginning to sprout whiskers.
Kneeling in wellies at a fresh-raked bed, I was pleasurably enveloped in that dark, spicy incense of decay the soil gives off in late November. It was soft enough to dig the holes with my finger and drop one garlic clove in each, pointy end up.
A golden centipede raced for cover, its scores of little legs flowing flawlessly over the ups and downs: a ready-made rover for Mars or moon. A robin, one of the acre's indeterminate dozen, darted down hopefully beside me. Too late to intercept the centipede, it copied Norman MacCaig's hen, which "stares at nothing with one eye, then picks it up". A closer look found tiny snails' eggs clustered like hail-stones in a hollow.
And the quiet . . . It was always hushed on November days, on a road that leads only to the mountain, but now there's often the feeling of nobody here. Out for our early walk, the dog and I freeze at the ditch as car after car rushes out before eight to clock in at jobs up the coast. It's at week-ends the hillside farms come alive with revving tractors. On a mere Tuesday morning, I am left behind with the lone exclamations of ravens and sheep and long sighs of surf from the shore.
At least I can still hear most of the things I should (except, perhaps, my wife calling). Many people in cities, it seems, are slowly but literally taking leave of their senses - not just hearing, but smell, touch, taste and sight. Fifteen years ago, according to recent studies, Germans could distinguish 300,000 sounds.
Today they average 180,000, and many children don't make it past 100,000 (haven't we been telling them?).
I read all this in the new Irish Pages, (14 euro in good bookshops), the impressive writers' journal edited by Chris Agee at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. Its 270-page "Earth Issue" is especially concerned about the more appalling ambitions of biotechnology, and offers interviews and essays on "The Genetic Nightmare" from several high-powered critics in America. Beside them is my own mild meditation on the course of plant breeding (real breeding, that is, not the manipulations of GM) and today's commercial genocide of unprofitable food-plant seeds.
It was sparked by the startling growth outside my window this summer of an enormous, stately specimen of alexanders, a greeny gold umbellifer normally absent from this hillside and one of the earliest vegetables in the history of cultivation. Just as garlic goes back to the Sumerians and Scythians, alexanders was grown - where else? - in ancient Alexandria and came west with the Romans, who pickled its pungent winter root and blanched its spring shoots to munch like celery. It reached Ireland with the monastery gardens and then escaped to warm corners on frost-free coasts. The Irish name, lus na ngrán dubh, vouches for its antiquity and I have, indeed, saved some of its abundant black seeds to sow again.
The centuries up to the 17th heaped the Irish plate with vegetables in a variety later quite eclipsed by the fatally obliging potato. Peas and broad beans, so easily dried for winter, were among the earliest, and cabbage a special favourite of the monks. Bunching onions, with garlic and leeks, were by far the most valued vegetable of medieval Gaelic Ireland and part of the food rent levied by a lord upon his clients.
That was in the days when the nutritional value of food-plants was still inseparable from their medicinal worth: you ate what was good for you. The huge virtue of garlic, apart from its majestic organ-notes of flavour, lies in the extraordinary range of its medicinal and anti-bacterial action. Will there be deodorised, GM garlic? Not in my back yard.