Illustration by Clara Dupré
For Ireland, I’d packed light. Shorts, a single pair of sandals: thanks to the constant English heatwaves, I couldn’t imagine wearing much more than a bra and Solero drips. Also, maturely, I was leaving room in my suitcase. A fatal mixture of sentimentality about childhood East Cork summers, love for my West Cork family-in-law, greed and garden-love means I always return with multiple briny bags hidden about my clothing: pebbles, moss, extra-coarse flour, several loaves of brown bread, seed-heads, blackcurrant seedlings and all the seaweed I can drip through customs. We’d be spending the week on the beach, improving our freckles; the foraging would be limitless. How wise I was to allow space for that.
And I had a task: the weeding. At home, what with the lack of space and my greed for greenery, no dandelion baby has a chance. But my new relatives have a gravelly drive and actual jobs, building houses, birthing livestock: thistles were taking root. It was, I promised selflessly, the least I could do.
It’s delicate, being semi-British in the Rebel County, where red-and-white flags billow from every window and most roads lead to a Michael Collins memorial. God (non-denominational) knows I’ve tried. I’ve learned to make Irish tea (more solid than liquid), respectfully approach new-born calves, order seafood chowder. Although my eating everyone else’s potato skins is frowned upon, I can win favour by feeding the outdoor dog Taytos, muttering “Landlords” when we pass a Georgian house. But what the Corkonians most value is labour, activity. A weekend reading Maeve Brennan on the sofa wouldn’t cut it. I’d have to win their hearts through horticultural toil.
Not even the damp haze surrounding Cork airport could weaken my excitement. Bare legs are dryable; mud, like gooseberry-thorn scratches, is a mark of plantswomanly pride. And, if I couldn’t be with my own vegetables, at least I’d be watering beside my surely delighted new relatives. The consolation for the hell of holidays is learning from strangers, absorbing ye olde wisdom about irrigation, soil-enrichment. Corkonians do complain about the weather, but it’s probably just for show. Teach me the ways of old Corcaigh, I’d cry, and in return I’ll work for my keep. I may be British, sorry, but I’m also a child of compost, a citizen of the manure-heap. I don’t care if it’s 30C; just let me at your wilting cabbages.
Imagine an English suburban garden inflated, untrammelled, sexily reproducing in every byway. Even in deepest summer, the lanes of West Cork are a bedlam of plant-life: grass beneath the car-wheels, shaggy lichens like Gen-Z armpits, overnourished bindweed rampaging up granite walls into the chestnuts above. You’d think the Atlantic sea-spray would make gardening impossible; the opposite seems to be true. Probably due to those deep depression isobar microclimates I’d ignored at school, plus run-off from all the cows, every hedgerow heaves with moist greenery, but of an oddly domestic kind. Even the ferns and brambles are swamped by towering megaliths of wild fuchsia, its purple-magenta flowers garnishing hydrangea and rambling roses like a demented child’s fairy-cake dream, all underplanted by groin-high thickets of crocosmia. At least, I think. It was difficult to be sure.
I’m pro-rain. As a gardener, a reader, an enemy of camping, I welcome it
I’m pro-rain. As a gardener, a reader, an enemy of camping, I welcome it. And, although none of my three weather apps makes sense, I’d dimly gathered that there might be showers: 0.3, 0.7, even 1.3mm. No, wait, maybe it was cm. Either was fine; a centimetre of rain is nothing. My pots of chicory and dahlias need far more. Heatwaves were gripping Europe, which included Ireland; despite being a Geography dunce, I knew that. Hooray for drizzle.
But this wasn’t drizzle. It wasn’t even rain. It was horizontal, streaming, lashing, a river in full flood, only… facial. The islands usually visible from the living room window, all those delicious beaches and swathes of seaweed, were blotted out. As I crouched on the sodden drive in my T-shirt and Tevas, I could sense the family shaking their heads in awe. It was definitely awe, for my heedless labour. No rain-jacket or gloves for me; I was virtually a farmer now.
Better still, I was becoming Irish. It wasn’t just ragwort I was plucking from the mud; it was horse-killer, cattle-poisoner. I might not strictly have road frontage, but I could replant these crocosmia corms in my front yard. Although in Ireland they say montbretia and I, cravenly, join in. Plus, that white flower, allegedly woodbine, because if I couldn’t meet their pipe-smoking grandfather, at least I’d know how he smelt.
The rain didn’t let up. My twigs are drying in the kitchen, my clothes still scented with moist collie. Customs spent agonising minutes rechecking the X-ray of my bag before neutrally stating: “It’s rocks” and letting me pass. Yet the holiday was definitely a success. I’d always worried about winning over the Corkonians, but now I know the secret: hard work. And like, unfortunately, every other Brit, I even nurse dreams of becoming a West Cork inhabitant. The weather, I tell myself, can’t be that bad.
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