Emerald Isle? Just now it's the most beautiful lush white island, with hawthorn cascading along every field hedge. A run through eight or nine counties over the weekend brought the unanimous view that never has the May been so rich and luxuriant.
No point in mourning the miles of hedge that went up in funeral pyres when the EEC hit us in the early Seventies. The farmer has to live, too. But this year makes up for everything.
The blackthorn is, of course, gone or going in most places, but we have, in addition to the hawthorn, the elder coming in.
White, too, and useful. And you can fry these flowers crisp with your bacon and egg, if you're that sort of household.
Then there are the white flowers of the Roman or mountain ash. A rich cream, rather than pure white, but the smell is a bit rank.
And, of course, you have other white, garden flowers, and the falling white blossom of the pear tree. White, too, or whitish, is the flower of the white beam, much favoured around County Meath, it was noticed, and also increasingly being used in city streets.
Pinky white apple blossom and, a minute note in the whole, the white of the open quince flower (cydonia oblonga).
All this against the magnificent yellow of the whins or furze.
One of the most delightful white blossoms is vanishing from our polluted rivers, or our carelessly overlooked rivers. It is the flower of the water crow foot, that lovely plant with its long tresses waving in the current, long to maybe twelve or fifteen feet or more. So it seems as you watch it go with the flow of the currents. About now it should be putting up its white butter cup like flowers.
It was one of the casualties in many rivers of the savage arterial drainage schemes. After the drainage, two riverside residents went to a sister stream that had not been scoured, and brought back roots which they planted, bound up in sacking as recommended by an expert.
For some years, they thrived, was it last year's drought that killed them off! Or pollution?
There is hardly a strand of the weed left. No shelter for the fish.
One of the most beautiful pictures in a beautiful book The Natural History of Britain and Ireland by Heather Angel and others, has a simple caption
Flowering water crow foot fringes the river Bandon at Inishannon it is masterly green, green and white. The green is of the trees that line the bank and their reflection in the green water. And then the white flowering ends of the sinuous tresses of huge masses of crow foot. You hope it is still so today. This was 1981.