My morning ritual of wandering the wild bank of the Grand Canal between Bluebell and Ballyfermot begins with a mad crisscrossing dash up the Tyreconnell Road. Maurice our Scottish Terrier loves to lunge barking loudly, in a bark more suited to a much larger dog, at any other passing dogs, motorbikes, certain trailers, the odd tractor and kids on scooters that cross our path. The dash and the crisscross is to avoid this calamity and the chaos of Maurices barking causing the other two dogs to follow suit, often barking and pulling in different directions. This adrenal rush has slightly abated this month due to school holidays but is nonetheless a nail biting challenge at times. Dogs distracted and soothed by treats gives me a few moments peace with a flat-white on a stool in front of Boom Coffee where this morning all chat was about yesterdays break in and robbery. Craig the coffee shops owner was quite shook up by the incident. I chatted to a local man outside who reeled off a list of similar recent incidents and removed his baseball cap to show me the fresh cut on his forehead caused by stone throwing youths on my favoured stretch of the canal last Saturday night.
I mulled this over as I made my way along the canal. There are lots of things that attract me to this particular spot but the two most obvious reasons are that the dogs can roam freely more or less uninterrupted here and after the mad rush of getting here the pace relaxes and allows for much meandering and sniffing and checking out of undrgrowth(thats the dogs not me)And personally I get to see, feel and smell the seasons with the ever changing waves of growth and decay in the mostly undisturbed flora of this wild spot. This incident brought into focus how much you need to be aware of the surrounding city even if the immediate landscape would appear benign and as much as ruminating on nature is part of the attraction it cant be with total absorption. Always best to keep my sences attuned to more than just the immedite.
Now in the hight of summer there is much to absorb and to be absorbed by. Elderflowers are past their short lived prime and the huge saucers of delicate cream have mostly evaporated and just the stragglers remain. Now is the time of Meadow Sweet whose vanilla and candy-floss scented contributions are interwoven through the long grasses and reeds on either side of the path. These beauties have been seeing growing interest from the forager and chef communities and have been making appearances on the more discerning menus of the season.
But the plant that has consumed me most in recent days is Buddleia whose heavily scented flowers in shades of pale lilac and mauve through to deepest purple always have a mesmerising impact on me. This is partly driven by nostalgia as they feature heavily in memories of summer holidays to west cork and my grandparents home there. Smell is such a strong and clever trigger. So of course is colour. And Buddleia has a deep deep impact. It forms a trio of plants with Crocosmia and Fuchsia that to me as a child represented the wild hedgerows of West Cork in the hight of summer. Odd then to think that each of these plants though naturalised are non native. This I only pieced together many many years after my last childhood holiday and was surprised and a bit shocked by this fact. A point I will return to and unwrap further later in the summer.
Back to Buddleia. I have a habit of researching plants as they come into season and so every year I can add to my personal data bank of information as well as my personal experience of plants, which is always the best starting point. There are over a hundred species and cultivars of Buddleia but the most common type is Buddleia davidii (also known as the "Butterfly Bush"), which came originally from China and was named after Father Père Armand David a French Missionary/Botanist who had been visiting Ichang City in Hubei province (Central/Eastern China) in 1887. And although there seem to no culinary uses for this plant it is used in both Chinese and Korean traditional medicines.
Aside from this it has managed to both ubiquitous and largely invisible at the same time. It is invisible in the sense that it goes greatly unnoticed by the general public who seem mostly blind to its charms. I have noted this so many times as I try to describe it to mystified faces. Mystification replaced by shrugging acknowledgment of “ oh yeah Butterfly Bush” on sight. As well as this mean feat, its tenacious nature means that it seems equally at home in city and countryside, clinging to old redbrick chimneys and forming mini forests in the most unlikely of abandoned spaces.
But its the personal connection that gripes the most and I return again and again to this plant drawn in by its magical abilities to conjure a sense of warm nostalgia and comfort. Its purple flowers alive and humming with the buzz and work of differnt insects from butterflys to bees makes this a powerful and potent symbol of summer, growth, hard work and beauty.