The green green grass of home

There are few sights as beautiful as the Irish countryside on a sunny Midsummer evening. Driving back home through Monaghan and Louth my eyes feast on the festival landscape that Midsummer serves. The gentle light of a sun that is staying up late allows the colours to emerge in the glad-rags of their best-dressed, seasonal plant-hosts. The sloping drumlins of Monaghan, like shop-window displays, present their goods to the seeing eye. The grazing livestock in the pasture lands provide polka-dot contrasts to the gentle greens of the swards and meadows. Here, jet-black Angus cattle, spread out over the grassland in well-spaced symmetry. There, cappuccino-coloured Charolais cattle lie on a hillside, soaking up the last rays of the sinking sun and chewing the cud over a day in the life of a beef-bred bullock.

A murder of crows opportunistically hunts in the stubble of a recently-shaved silage field. A few shy rabbits vigilantly graze on the headlands. A stream of vehicles weaves its impatient way home. People with problems in their faces grip their steering wheels tightly; their eyes trained on the left-hand side. Roadside grasses have reached seed-stage. The gentle lilac of a spread of full headed hay-seed defies the reaper on the verge of the motorway, nodding and swaying in the wake of the traffic-thread. The carefully cultivated verges of the recently constructed roadways are a credit to the planners and to the planters. A stray rape-seed plant reflects the yellow sun as it dims and sinks towards the receptive horizon. Other newer crops like maize plants, with their strong shining leaves and stalks have filled in the furrows and hidden the bio-degradable covering that protected them in their infancy.

As I moved into the plains of Louth, the sheets of grain in the generously-proportioned fields were taking on the first shades of ripeness. The trimmed-back sycamores in the hedgerows glowed purple in their tenderest shoots and the elderberry bushes splashed out their frothiest blossoms. The oak and the ash have filled out the winter gaps in their branches and the chestnut has shot up chandeliers of blossom, pointing to the buttermilk sky. Pig’s parsley or hogweed reminded me of childhood ‘loanins’ and of stories about its leaves and roots being fed to swine in poorer days. More prosperous times were suggested to me by the Dynasty-style, dormered mansions that dwarf their single-storied predecessors hidden further down the laneways. The industrialisation of agriculture was evident in the giant spools of cut sward rolled into a corner awaiting fork-lifted help.

I used to wonder what all the talk was of Ireland as an ‘Emerald Isle’. ‘Surely grass is green everywhere’ I generalised. I thought that talk of ‘forty shades of green’ was mere emigrant sentimentality. It was only when I touched down at Shannon in daylight, following my first trip abroad, that I realised just what it was that enthralled visitors and returnees. I had discovered that grass could be sunburnt-brown, wiry and sparse, like the combed-over hair of a balding man, or tall and dull-hued in a desert-drought. As our aeroplane tilted and hovered in its descent, the patchwork of fields below, that I saw through the dull surface of the cabin window, appeared vivid and bright, luscious and shining in the wake of an autumn shower. Now I knew and understood all that talk of Ireland green.

Sometimes I try to impress on people who live in the area of Mid-Louth that they have an environment and living conditions that are second to none. Those who are fortunate enough to live in the villages and in the countryside mostly enjoy a quality of life that many city-dwellers can only dream of. Emigration is no longer almost compulsory for many of our young. The climate is temperate and predictable in its unpredictable Irish way. Communities are largely homogenous with no serious ethnic or political tensions. Farms are generously proportioned and fertile. The environment is rich in its diversity and largely unspoiled. Family and community life is still strong despite the inroads of modernity and the confusion that social change inevitably brings. Maybe I’m being romantic or utopian in my reading of the countryside but then I was driving home from the wedding banquet of my niece!

It all reminds me of a poem by Alexander Pope. The poem is called ‘The Quiet Life’.

‘Happy the man whose wish and care / a few paternal acres bound, / content to breathe his native air / in his own ground. / Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, / whose flocks supply him with attire; / whose trees in summer yield him shade, / In winter, fire. / Blest who can unconcern'dly find / Hours, days, and years slide soft away / In health of body, peace of mind, / Quiet by day, / Sound sleep by night; study and ease / Together mixt, sweet recreation, / and innocence, which most does please / With meditation. / Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; / Thus unlamented let me die; / Steal from the world, and not a stone / Tell where I lie’.