“We wouldn’t be here without plants. Life wouldn’t exist without them.”
This week, I’m very lucky to be chatting with Dr Noeleen Smyth Botanist at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin in Dublin. Noeleen is currently working on launching the new National Irish Seed Bank. She is also continuing her work in Invasive Species, Island endemic species recovery along with the conservation research into Ireland’s rare and threatened Fern and Bryophytes species, Noeleen has been a great supporter of the Burren Nature Sanctuary, helping develop and label our collection of Burren flora. Follow the National Botanic Gardens on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter.
How did you become a nature lover?
I was lucky to have had a rural childhood in County Kildare surrounded by Boglands, which I absolutely adore and just a lovely habitat to see. My Nana was a nature lover and a gardener, so I learned a lot of common names from her, like Cuckoo flower, that we see early in the year. It started a lifelong love of flowers and plants from having been immersed from a young age. I didn’t realise at the time but probably got to see a lot more plants than urban children. We also lived close to Coolcarrigan Gardens, which is another fantastic, exotic, oasis and I had part-time jobs in a nursery Dorans Heather nursery, so I was just always surrounded by plants.
I made a career of it because nothing else felt right, being away from plants and the outdoors just didn’t seem right.
This time last year you came to the Burren Nature Sanctuary. We were doing a walk and I remember how excited you were with all the different mosses!
“Well the first question people normally say when you tell them you know about moss is ‘How can you kill it!’
I actually love the stuff, it’s so spongy and lovely! We are very wet here so surprisingly for people we hold a huge variety of moss species and Ireland is we are well renowned for moss species, even though wildflowers might grab a lot of the attention, mosses are our most famous flora- the mosses and the Liverworts. They slow down the flooding, our bogs are big moisture sponges, so without mosses, we would be pretty flooded all the time. Mosses do a lot for us here in Ireland.
It’s lovely when you can see the macro photography of the mosses, you can really get a feeling for them. You need to see them up close. Even experts have to look at the finer detail in them to identify them, which is kind of amazing. You have to work to find out the name of your moss and they have hidden depths, which I like. One of their names is ‘Cryptogam’ which means ‘hidden marriage’ and is a class of plants with concealed reproductive organs. It means you have to go on an expedition to find out.”
Do you any other favourite plants or animals that you like?
Well, one plant I have seen down with you, Mary, which I think really fascinated me when I was a kid was Arum maculatum which is also known as Lords and Ladies. Every kid in Ireland is told to STAY AWAY! STAY AWAY! THEY ARE POISONOUS!, you see those luminous orange berries in Autumn and you are instantly drawn to them. But they are more fascinating in the Springtime, we don’t often look inside. They have a sinister hood called a spade and inside is this one little spike, like a finger. It’s called a Spadix. So that gets a bit warmer and emits a foul odour and attracts little flies from everywhere. Then when they crawl in and they’re looking for the source of this delicious stinking scent. They crawl down past all these hairs, which point them just in one direction, and then they are down into a little chamber. They are there to fertilize and pollinate the plants, they can’t crawl back up as the hairs keep them trapped down there, they are one-directional. So when we open it up, you could see all the little flies that were trapped by this Arum until they got the job done. So they are trapped in their little prison pollinating away with no reward! I love the tricks plants play and these hidden things that we don’t often see.
As humans, we think we are the masters of our domain but really we’re just sharing this place. We wouldn’t be here without plants. Life wouldn’t exist without them. They have been here for a long time and have evolved lots to tricks to try and survive here.
I have been working in conservation. So recent things such as to try and develop a conservation collection of all our rarest plants in Ireland, to collect the seed and have a nice Seed Bank for Ireland. Burren Nature Sanctuary will be a little satellite site for this project. Together we can do a lot. I suppose trying to save as many seeds as we can of our rare species. So we have this bank for the future.
One plant we have been working on is a little Sea Cottonweed from Our Ladies Island down in Wexford. We have been collecting seed from that, there are only twelve plants left in Ireland. So they are in a very precarious position if something changes down there that’s an Irish species gone extinct. I like to be part of what we can do together to save our species or to make sure they don’t go extinct on our watch.
So we (Burren Nature Sanctuary) are partners with Jardi Botanic de Sollér and Noeleen kindly gave them a tour around the Botanic Gardens. Burren Nature Sanctuary staff went to their site in Majorca and they showed us their nursery, all the native plants that they’re repopulating around the island, in places that have been damaged by chemical farming and suchlike. We are working towards getting a bank of these rare native plants and looking after them for repopulation sites. We are very excited to be working with you on the National Seed Bank Project.
Do you feel spiritually connected with nature?
“I think Ireland is a very magical and spiritual country anyway. We live surrounded by all these Celtic things, like down in Clare you have the Dolmens, the landscape is dotted with them, we are immersed in it. I’m looking at a map. There seems like there isn’t a square kilometre where there isn’t a Holywell Well or a Holy Cross or a Holy something, it’s a very ancient landscape. There are some very magical places, Glennstall Abbey in Limerick is an amazing place. The Clare Glens are down around there, a wonderful green oasis. I’ve been following the Killarney Fern around all these magical elfin places, they are very special to me.”
A lot of spiritual people have been attracted to the Burren as well. We have Saint Coleman, who came and lived in his cave for a long time up in the Burren National Park.
He had his own little well that has the cure for back problems. You have to lean over backwards and dip the affected area in- not easy! We took the Spanish botany group up there last year and saw a frog and a Frog Orchid! The Orchids in the Burren are a topic in themselves…
“Yes there are just so many species to be seen, in a short drive around you can tick off so many. I think 70% of the Irish Flora is in the Burren region, it really is the centre for botany.
The seed bank will be a backup but keeping plants in situ is what you want, you want your plants and animals to be safe where nature wants them to be. The seed bank is an insurance collection but we don’t necessarily know how to restore certain habitats. If you asked me to build a piece of the Burren, I might have the seed but nothing can replace the wild where nature has built the habitat for thousands of years. The Burren has heat and alkalinity from the limestone, acidity from rain, all these different elements it would be impossible to recreate. In the limestone rock, which is alkaline you get these tiny little layers of humus that are acid, and then you have plants deep in the grykes, it’s all so wacky. All the many little miniature habitats, miniature climates all sitting there together, which is outstanding. Then all your Alpine plants with all your Mediterranean plants in the same place, the complexity is just huge there. That’s what makes it so amazing and why visitors come to see the place. I mean, I know of times I talked to plant people abroad and they always say
‘Oh, The Burren that is one place I want to go’.”
Have you any inspiring nature books that you’d like to recommend?
I have a big interest in islands. There’s always quirky things that are here, or not here, for instance we have this big link to the North of Spain with our Irish flora, this doesn’t happen in the UK. Islands are fascinating. So there’s one book about islands called Song of the Dodo by David Quammen Scribner. It talks about rare species and why species go extinct. Just the chance thing, when you’re down to very few numbers of a species, like our Cottonweed, we are down to about 12, these stochastic factors are just random things that can happen like a wave could wash them over. So I suppose this book really influenced me in choosing my career.
In our hallway now, we have a video showing what we do every day behind the scenes at the National Botanic Garden and in the Herbarium. We have panels with information on some of the projects and so on. There’s an interactive panel. You can take a quiz there. There is a lot of research and projects and specimens going back hundreds of years, there are thousands of plants in there. The economic botany collection contains all the plants and uses that people have had for plants in Ireland. We have the national Shamrock collection of all the Shamrocks that were sold in Dublin for the last hundred years!
We have all these wacky things in there because we are meant to be able to answer anyone, about any plant in Ireland as part of our role. And it’s a little bit of fun too!
If you had a magic wand what would you do for the planet today?
I suppose the tropical rainforest is just my instant wish- put those right back. These are the lungs of the Earth to replenish our Oxygen. I think one of the most shocking things I’ve seen recently was a map which projected a model of the dates of when we would lose all our tropical rainforest. Some of it wasn’t so far away. It was happening in the next hundred years and I was shocked. How have we got to this state? So without our lungs, I think we don’t breathe so well and I think we see, with this virus, how connected to nature we are. We definitely cannot be using up all our wild resources. We cannot be consuming our wildlife like this, we cannot be taking away their habitats because it will impact massively on our lives. We’re living through it at the moment. So as bad as this virus is, I think, well, it’s a bit of a nature’s wakeup call for us all, we are all reconnected now. Nobody exists in isolation and we cannot take our species for granted anymore.
I do think it’s economics, we need to take value in nature, it’s cheaper to buy tropical timber sometimes. I mean, that is ridiculous. Over 70 per cent of the CITES-listed timber species we use in the EU comes from the wild, from these tropical rainforests and it’s cheaper to do that and that is a false economy.
I work with the EU as part of my role, the scientific review group, which looks at trade into Europe and where we can stop trade that we know is just totally unsustainable.
What is a good way to engage people with nature?
I think first of all take a look around you, I’ve been in lockdown in suburban Dublin and during that time I have seen dragonflies, baby swans, strange sea creatures and bountiful spring blossoms. An abundance of biodiversity on my urban doorstep, the flowers were easily identified with Zoe Devlin’s superb picture guide to Irish Wildflowers and the sea creatures identified by Ethna Viney who has a lovely column highlighting seasonal species every Saturday in the Irish Times. The next thing to do is go for a tour of the National Botanic Gardens, Burren Nature Sanctuary or some local park or place offering tours and learn some fascinating things, I guarantee you will be hooked and your life will be enriched and also you’ll appreciate the job nature and plants do for us in providing our food, medicines, clothing and even the air we breathe.
We cannot exist without them.
Recommended book
The Song of the Dodo
BY: David Quammen
Check out the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin at
www.botanicgardens.ie
Listen to the Nature Magic episode