The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (6 page)

We played in the sea for about an hour, collecting particularly nice examples of each shell type we saw, after ensuring that their owners and everything attached to them had died. On that day, it seemed that being a biologist was an excuse to splish-splash in the water, get muddy, pick up dead stuff, and get paid for doing it. It was an excuse to be a four-year-old child without an authority figure hovering over you. Standing in any one spot too long was ill-advised, as black organic ooze crept up from under the clean tan-coloured sand and engulfed our feet, making the whole experience that bit more delightfully gross.

We cycled south along the coast to a second spot that Norbert had recommended and watched as the sea retreated further from land. As it did, it exposed more indistinct black smudges, but much further out. I contemplated whether I had seen enough oysters for one day or whether I should tromp out to this next group. One ugly oyster is pretty much like another, right? But my conscience got the better of me. First, I had come a very long way to see Pacific oysters, and surely more was better than less. Second, I knew that Norbert would ask me whether I had visited both sites. And so, with Lisa reclining on the dyke, I set off across the sands.

Or rather, I set off across sands covered everywhere by five centimetres of sea. No matter what my route, each step submerged my sandals and toes, but not my ankles. There seemed to be no way to get around flocks of birds taking advantage of the low-tide bounty. There were lots of gulls, plenty of raucous oystercatchers, with a handful each of turnstones, ducks, and geese, accompanied by endless shorebirds that even the most devout birdwatcher doesn’t try to identify.

Patches of oysters became larger and more common as I got further from shore. I stepped over and around beautiful patches of red, brown, and green algae, and avoided stranded jellyfishes, knowing that their dying remains can still sting. I marvelled at tiny
transparent comb jellies and strained to see minuscule transparent shrimp that could be found most easily by spotting their shadows.

And after more than twenty minutes of walking, I got to a really substantial oyster bed. It was as ugly as the biggest one at the first site, but without the fetid black ooze underfoot. But I found that I couldn’t stop there. Like a magpie drawn to a broken metal watch-strap, I walked further and further out, following oyster beds that turned into oyster reefs, reaching upward from the sand. In spots, cormorants roosted on the oysters, drying their wings in a crucifix posture.

Then I remembered that along parts of Canada’s east coast the tide comes in faster than a person can walk. I checked my watch and then the tide table in my pocket. The tide was returning, and I was more than a kilometre from shore. Checking the tide table again, I found that, where I was standing, the sea would reach almost exactly the crown of my head. No real need to worry though, as I had only a thirty-minute walk to shore and the tide would require six hours.

It had taken several decades, but I really felt that I was getting the hang of working for a living. Like everyone else, I had survived plenty of jobs that were less than entirely appealing and barely paid the bills. I had washed trucks, filled oxygen cylinders, unloaded empty beer bottles from trucks, and scraped bakery floors. But on this day my life as a biologist was transcendent. As the sea slowly recovered its oysters, Lisa and I watched the sun shining off clouds to the east, making a stunning reflection in the wet sand. Lisa was in such a good mood that she indicated that she would be willing to eat an oyster if it would help my narrative. I explained that it wasn’t part of her job description.

REASON NUMBER THREE FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: BECAUSE I NEED TO REPLACE THE TREES I CUT DOWN.

W
HEN IT COMES TO BIG, BOLD, AND BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS,
it is hard to beat a rhododendron. You also have to give them big points for variety; there is something like 1,000 recognized species, supplemented by all manner of hybrids. Colourful and showy to a fault, they have a wealth of admirers. In Victorian Britain, there was no shortage of adventurers willing to travel to eastern Asia and risk their hides in order to collect new species of rhododendron and bring them back to England. This troupe included such luminary botanists as Joseph Hooker, who brought back about thirty species, and the aptly named George Forrest, who hauled home an astonishing 300 species. Today, rhododendron fanciers’ clubs are found everywhere the plant can be cultivated. Rhododendrons have even been named the state flowers of Washington (
Rhododendron macrophyllum
) and West Virginia (
Rhododendron maximum
)
.

And this is all well and good, because most species of rhododendron know how to sit still and shut up. But at any large party, there is always one guest who doesn’t know when to stop drinking
or when to go home. In the world of large and showy flowering plants, that unruly guest is
Rhododendron ponticum,
sometimes called the common rhododendron, which is native to parts of southern Europe and the Middle East. The great ancient oak forests of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are under attack from this pushy introduced monster. Despite being a big and blustery plant, it was largely unknown in Ireland until the mid-1900s. But from then on, its destructive ways were well understood by anyone who loved oak forests. The plant has even been given an Irish Gaelic name—
ródaideandrón.
I was off to a national park in Ireland’s southwest to find it.

Rhododendrons are not the only botanical import to the Emerald Isle. According to Sylvia Reynolds of Ireland’s National Botanic Gardens, almost as many alien plant species have been uncovered in Ireland as there are plants native to the country. Although humans have been bringing new plants to the British Isles since Neolithic times, the last two centuries have seen a rapid acceleration, with 920 human-introduced plant forms arriving in Ireland. One of the most influential plant additions to the country was the potato, and I was determined to find a few of those too.

My only previous trip to Ireland had not gone entirely well. I had travelled to Dublin to examine a stuffed Labrador Duck, and despite trying with all my heart to love the country, I had found Dublin noisy and crowded, simultaneously uncivilized and overly civilized. On this return trip to Ireland, I promised myself that I would steer well clear of large cities, stick to tourist-approved venues, drink only in the most highly regarded pubs, and lodge in only the friendliest hostelries in the land.

Arriving at Shannon airport, I had my first and only pleasant surprise of the day; at no extra charge, the car rental agency had upgraded me to a much bigger vehicle. “Big” is, of course, a relative word. By North American standards, this car was a tiddler, but I was pleased to see that my backpack fit in the boot, and my legs fit under the steering wheel.

My newly purchased travel guide to southwestern Ireland used
less than flattering terms to describe Limerick City, which, “at first sight has something rather drab about it.” The guidebook suggested that visitors to the city, despite the community’s recent facelift, wouldn’t find anything much cheerier on the second, or indeed any subsequent, viewing. But unless your destination is the tiny community of Newmarket-on-Fergus, travelling from Shannon to anywhere else in Ireland requires a dissection of Limerick.

And High Holy Almighty, what a trip it was. I could deal with being on the wrong side of the road, and managed the stick shift in my left hand like a professional, but the roads were far too narrow for driving habits developed on mighty North American thoroughfares. For the first time—but certainly not the last—I wished that I had insisted on the smaller rental car. I had navigation notes for the best route through Limerick on the seat beside me, but they proved entirely useless as I repeatedly spotted street signs too late to make necessary lane changes. I eventually gave up on my notes and started looking for signs for route N20 on the assumption that it would eventually lead me to the N21 and south through the wilds of County Limerick.

I
SUSPECT THAT THERE IS NO WAY
to fully appreciate the history of Ireland without understanding the impact of potatoes, known as
práta
in Irish Gaelic. To understand potatoes in Ireland, you have to understand Sir Walter Raleigh. This is a challenge all by itself; even straightforward details like the year of his birth and the proper spelling of his surname are not beyond debate. Some authorities claim that when Raleigh returned to the British Isles from one of his expeditions to North America, perhaps his 1587 trip, he brought spuds back with him. Others claim that Thomas Hariot should get the credit for introducing potatoes to the Old World. Some of those who favour the Raleigh story give him credit for planting potatoes at his Irish estate at Myrtle Grove, Youghal. Others claim that the first cultivation of potatoes in Ireland occurred at Castle Matrix when Raleigh turned them over to Lord Southwell. I was not due to travel anywhere near Myrtle Grove, but my rhododendron adventure
was going to take me close to Castle Matrix, and so I conveniently chose to believe that this was the site of the potato’s first cultivation in Ireland.

Potatoes grew better than just about any other crop in the stony soils of the Emerald Isle, and soon came to completely dominate the diet of Irish peasants. Potatoes contain little protein, and in centuries past, in order to meet their nutritional needs some folks consumed between four and six kilograms of potatoes each day. Putting this much faith in just one crop is a pretty risky thing. One bad harvest is going to leave you rather hungry. One total crop failure and you and your family are going to starve to death. This is exactly what happened in Ireland in the mid-1840s. A parasitic water mould known as
Phytophthora infestans
causes late blight of potatoes, and in one week in the summer of 1846 the blight destroyed virtually the entire Irish potato crop. Between famine and emigration, the population of Ireland fell from 8.5 million to 6.5 million in just six years.

The community of Adare lies southwest of Limerick, and Rathkeale lies southwest of Adare. If my guidebook was to be trusted, Castle Matrix could be found just southwest of Rathkeale, although I was damned if I could find it or anything that looked, sounded, or tasted like it. I couldn’t find a single helpful sign. I began to wonder if all the signs come down in the off-season, or whether the lack of useful signs was a way to get tourists to stop at convenience stores to ask for directions. I stopped at a convenience store, but when I asked the young fellow behind the counter about Castle Matrix, he just gave me a big shrug. As I reached the door on the way out he called, “Not from around here.” I don’t know if he was referring to me or to himself.

After my failure to find Castle Matrix, I mistakenly trusted my guidebook when it suggested that I might want to travel to Ballingary and from there find the hillside at Knockfierna, site of a well-preserved famine village. Before the famine, Knockfierna was home to 1,000 people. Only 300 remained after. A heritage group had developed a park to commemorate those persons lost
to the famine, with restored dwellings of the former residents. But all of this came to nothing for me, because I could find neither evidence of Knockfierna nor anyone to point me in the right direction. On the road to Ballingary, a fellow in a grey Land Cruiser tucked in behind me and tailgated me for the next five kilometres. As we approached the town, I slowed down for schoolchildren, and the Land Cruiser took the opportunity to zoom by me. The driver also took the opportunity to give me the finger.

In a last-ditch effort to find something linked to the potato famine in Ballingary, I headed for the local churchyard. I was hoping to find graves of people who had died in or around 1846. Many of the headstones were too new for persons carried off by the famine, but a few stones had been rubbed nearly smooth by time, hosting a thick crust of lichen. James Reidy had prepared a headstone for his wife, Mary, who died on March 23, 1910, at the age of seventy-four. Hence, Mary would have survived the famine as a young girl.

In three ways, southwest Ireland is like Prince Edward Island on Canada’s east coast. Both spots are populated by people of Irish ancestry. People in both regions are really big on cultivating potatoes. Finally, in both places it is assumed that everyone knows where they are, and knows how to get to where they need to be. If you can find a road sign in southwest Ireland, rest assured that it won’t be helpful. Three roads leading out of Ballingary were signposted to lead to Newcastle West (An Caisleán Nua), my next destination. I took the road with the newest-looking sign. At a crossroad a bit further along, a sign indicated that I could get to Kilmallock by turning left, but gave no hint of how to get to Newcastle West. I turned right.

This was probably a mistake. About ten kilometres later, I spotted a gigantic broken curb jutting into the road the instant before it tore a hole the size of a €2 coin in my front right sidewall. I kept control of the car and pulled into a quiet side street.

Before leaving Shannon airport, I had paid the rental agency a lot of money for the best possible car insurance and the promise of roadside assistance. In the hope that I could get someone
else to change my tire, I set off to find a public telephone. Coming to a crossroad, I found a sign that told me I could turn right for Limerick or left for Tralee. Still no indication of how I could get to Newcastle West, and no telephone box in sight. I hailed a fellow pedestrian, only to be told, “I don’t speak.” To Canadians in particular, or as a matter of general principle? While I was hauling the flat tire off my rental, a big white lorry pulled up, and the driver stuck his head out the window. He asked me if I had a puncture, and I thought for a moment that he was going to offer to help me put on the spare. Instead, he looked the car up and down, told me that new cars aren’t supposed to get punctures, and drove off.