Another Life: It takes an eye for foliage as "product" to decide that while mistletoe may, indeed, be very popular, it "needs a marketing boost to put it into the 'must have'", or to note the supermarket shelf-life problems inherent in offering metre-long branches of larch, "heavily coated with lichens", as a Christmas decoration.
And while branches of Douglas fir and Scots pine may have "innovative arrangement potential" the difficulty is that "you have to dislodge some of the older habits in foliage usage and prove you have a better product." Holly, one imagines, is marginally easier to stick behind the mirror.
Such gleanings from an "expert assessment of cultivated and wild foliage available in Ireland, 2004" set the tone of the latest booklet from the ever-energetic presses of COFORD, the National Council for Forest Research and Development. Markets for Non-Wood Forest Products by Pat Collier, Ian Short and James Dorgan looks for ways to turn a profit from plantations while they're maturing.
Bringing in tourists to shoot deer is a product that the COFORD bosses find attractive in their foreword: "a win-win situation for the owner - deer numbers are controlled, while at the same time income is provided through hunting fees." Most of the report itself, however, paints a more Arcadian scene, with only fleeting references to paint-ball battles and "motorised sports" in its discussion of tourist development. A walk through plantation rides and roads of the future could be fragrant with forsythia and brightly strung with the fruits of strawberry trees.
At a point where Irish and British flower-shop roses are grown in Kenyan, Spanish and Israeli polytunnels, and supermarkets offer banks of remarkably cheap foreign blossom on almost every day of the year, the foliage end of things offers Ireland a decent share of an EU market that imports more than €3.3 billion of flowers and leaves a year.
Mild, moist and shady, the typical Irish plantation could shelter the growth of plants whose twigs and greenery help to bulk out bouquets and add grace to flowers in vases.
The Irish foliage industry has grown steadily since it began in 1993, and a survey of seven big UK buyers showed the scale of what is involved. Tesco UK alone has a Christmas demand of more than 500,000 stems each of rhododendron and eucalyptus. Marks & Spencer uses up to 15 million stems a year, among them birch and willow twigs from Ireland to paint gold and silver (for Christmas windows, let us hope). Corkscrew hazel is in demand for giant arrangements in hotel and office lobbies (Turkey having cornered the market for the nuts); willow with catkins does well in spring; bog myrtle offers a spicy fragrance along with "plenty of side shoots".
"In Irish forests," say the authors, "branches are too green. Foliage requires to be more blue-coloured." The survey looks to the American north-west, where boughs of conifers, such as silver fir, are harvested sustainably for up to 25 years per tree. Here, too, is the home of "bear grass", Xerophyllum tenax a tall, toothed grass (really a lily), of which Tesco buys 700,000 stems a year.
There's a special "product profile" for another plant that Ireland doesn't know, even as an alien, and which is reckoned "the archetypal foliage, especially for supermarkets". The fronds of leatherleaf fern, Rumohra adiantiformis, are dark-green, glossy, fractal triangles, dipped in various mixtures after harvesting to help them travel, and last for weeks in a vase. It's a Dryopteris fern, like a sub-tropical version of Ireland's very rare holly fern, and comes chiefly from Costa Rica, Israel, Guatemala, South Africa and the US (Florida sells $70 million worth).
Its prominence in the survey seems almost as exotic as some of the herbs and shrubs for alternative medicine "identified as tolerant of moist shade" and thus, perhaps, suitable for Ireland. Recent proposals for forest renewal in British Columbia seem to have inspired the pages for American ginseng, golden seal, black cohosh - all native American species (but under hardwood trees) with powerful herbal reputations. Gingko, too, widely grown as a tough town tree in America, is offered as a candidate for growing in the plantation corridors kept for ESB servicing, where it would be kept to a modest height.
For essential oils, juniper and balsam fir; for upmarket cooking, shiitake and other exotic forest mushrooms grown on hardwood logs (already on show down at the Waterford Institute of Technology). The ideas fly around - a few, perhaps, to take root - going forward, of course.
