The night and day are at last one again – Hallelujah!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

And so, the night and day are one again. Hallelujah! Growing up in London I was aware of the seasons but only fully experienced them for the first time 20 years ago, when living in Bunowen.

At the Spring Equinox I stood outside my little house and felt the repressed and burgeoning power of growth. All around me the boulder-laden heathery mossy fields that pass as pasture in Connemara felt as if they were about to explode.

It was vital and visceral. I could feel it in my guts.

If you grew up in the countryside you’re most likely blissfully unaware of this feeling. Yet as an errant Londoner gone walkabout, it rooted me to the earth in a way that I always suspected lay within me.

Not that I suddenly became Mr Organic Universe 1995. I didn’t grow a beard (well, actually I did, but there was very little to do during Winter) nor was my land carpeted by rows of poly-tunnels.

Two decades later, umpteen houses down the road, it’s looking likely I’ll fail to erect my raised beds for the second year running. Time, money, energy, where does it all fit in? 

Yes, exactly, the usual excuses.

The Snapper also sometimes gets down on herself because she’s failed to move the hawthorn saplings to the new hedge, or split her primroses, so to make sure we enjoy our garden we wander around it, or on wet Winter evenings look at photos of our contribution to nature’s handiwork.

Now the sight of my blackcurrant bush pumping bulbous buds delivers a stab of hope. Shoots bursting out of rosebushes deliver energy to my storm-beaten body.

Ireland’s native plants act out an annual battle between yellow and purple. Early Spring, the yellow wins hands down with primrose, daffodil, narcissus, celandine and gorse.

When we moved here two years ago, I went mental with the strimmer and cleared the overgrown rear third of the garden.

We put down mypex sheets on one half of that area and planted three native apple saplings and an oak, grown in a pot, on the other side. We threw a net over the heating tank and grew sweet peas up its ugly breeze blocks and black plastic sides, camouflaging it with colour and scent.

Where the lawn rises to meet the old hedge we buried narcissus and bluebells. In the lawn we planted snowdrops and in the bed, tulips.

Two years ago, I cut a hole in the lawn by the front gate and planted a calla lilly, which I hoped might flower three weeks later, on her birthday. Happily, wonderfully, romantically, it duly obliged on the very day, since growing immense in the inexcusably shoddy stone wall enclosure I built around it.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.