In the lorry that moved our less presentable effects from a Dublin suburb in 1977 (garden shed, dismantled; empty wooden barrels; a spare gate, and so on) we made room for a very large house-plant that had occupied a corner of the living-room for years.
It was a Monstera deliciosa, otherwise the splitleaf philodendron or Swiss cheese plant, twining up a stake of driftwood to pretty near head height. It had kept me company in my Ballsbridge bachelor penthouse and I brought it into marriage like an incidental offspring. Lying flat in the lorry between the barrels its big, green hands of leaves fluttered pathetically. Set up again in Mayo in what was then a rather primitive cottage, the plant shivered in the draughts, and began to sag. Its glossy leaves, regularly washed and polished in Dublin, dulled over with turf-ash. Tactfully ignored by visiting neighbours, its sprawling presence now seemed increasingly alien to our new way of life, with its rolled-up sleeves and austerity of purpose. One morning, on sudden impulse, I removed it to the compost-heap.
Window-sills, from now on, were for raising vegetable seedlings in trays, even tomato plants, herbs and aubergines in pots (this before the greenhouse). About now in the Christmas holiday, I look forward to sowing Harbinger tomatoes in yogurt pots in the January warmth of my study: an early rite of magic to hasten the spring.
The monstrous Monstera belonged to one kind of aesthetic - the close-controlled design of interior decoration. In a new and deepening fascination with the plant world, beauty seemed all the greater because of its purpose: a million designs of leaves and flowers, all programmed for survival in different habitats, micro-climates, plant communities. With this new perspective, my summary execution of the Monstera was all the more regretted: those holes in the great leaves could let the wind through as the plant climbs, and filter light to the leaves below. The straggly aerial roots, plugged in to moss or soil, would lift it to six or seven metres (although hardly in a Connacht cottage).
Our first new houseplant was, as it happens, also a tree-dweller. In the moisture-laden shade of a western wood, the pretty polypody fern finds a perch on the horizontal boughs of oaks, rooting into the compost that gathers in the rough and mossy corrugations of the bark. I carried one home, complete with moss and twig, and kept it on the dinner-table in a pot of water, where it flourished, unfed, for years. Since then, the more usual squad of "shop" plants has infiltrated the house, from epiphytic forest cacti of erratic flowering and warring hues, to a priapic hippeastrum and a patient parlour palm. But ferns, which never flower, continue to enchant me, their feathery foliage such a graphic exercise in fractal geometry: shapes within shapes within shapes.
My favourite is an arching Boston fern grown from a frond a reader sent me. This group of ferns, Nephrolepis, was a favourite with Victorians and I have given mine pride of place in a suitably Victorian device: a fish-tank garden with a glass lid, floored with gravel and charcoal and a layer of peat.
The Victorians, crazy about ferns and plundering them from the wild, found they would not grow in city houses filled with gas fumes and coal-fire smoke. A miniature indoor greenhouse, or "terrarium", sealed, humid and draught-free, was the answer (and led on to the conservatories and sun-rooms of today). In my fish-tank, ferns grow among lichened stones and and tufts of exquisite common mosses from Coillte's conifer forests: a miniature indoor garden for the imagination.
A more ambitious terrarium is the double-glazed window with inner glass doors, already a feature of homes in Scandinavia and the Netherlands and often built in from the start. The space enclosed, like a deep window-sill, can be specially lit, warmed and humidified as a home for jungle plants: orchids and bromeliads among them. With a vigorous Irish Orchid Society just a few months old, perhaps such plant windows will provide a fresh turn in this island's gardening revolution. Anything that turns people on to the magic of the plant world must be a good thing, so long as we remember its implications for the wild. The impulse that roots up a hand-sized cushion of clubmoss from one of Coillte's drains is not so far removed from the collector's greed that sanctions the plunder of rare orchids.
Fortunately, the Irish Orchid Society comes with reassuring credentials, being based at the National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin and steered by conservation-minded enthusiasts. In its newsletter, Pollinia, UCD lecturer Ian Millichip argues strongly against buying from dealers whose orchids have been smuggled past the international vigilance of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). With a massive selection of plants legally available, "no one person can surely need that last plant for his or her collection".
All this suggests affluence, and one of the society's steering group is Wyndham Beere - "a whizz kid with money", as Pollinia unabashedly describes him - who recently sold his half-share in the Abrakebabra fast-food chain for some millions. This might give one impression, if I did not know of his parallel life as bird-watcher and nature-lover. In Pollinia, Wynn Beere writes of his favourite white-flowered moth orchid "looking ghostly at me in the bathroom" and also of the black-flowered Dracula vampira that survives cold nights in an unheated greenhouse. So there are orchids for all conditions - and, indeed, pockets, as some cost less than €1.
A society like this should be a good force for the conservation of Ireland's wild orchids, many of which grow in irreplaceable habitats. It could also, as an early priority, seek to fund the protection and publication of the superb paintings of all this island's orchids executed by Belfast's wayward genius, Raymond Piper.
Details of the society from Susan Galloway, c/o National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin 9.
