Rewilding yourself, rewilding Ireland

Co. Kerry, Ireland, June 2023

Suddenly, everything gets wilder. The garden at Castlemaine announces itself with a renewed intensity as we barrel into Summer Solstice. It is possible, I see now, to become even more lush. Every day, there is a new discovery, a trinity of rose arbors, a spill of loganberries and an abundance of herbs like mint and oregano and sage.

One morning, I discover wild leeks about to drop their papery skins. The next, Swiss chard. Then, fava beans. I ask my airbnb host Helen if I can partake of what’s in the garden. “Yes, yes absolutely, it’s all organic and help yourself.” I look up recipes for fava beans.

When she arrives two days later, she brings raspberries and a red beet from her garden. “I’m glad you appreciate it,” she says of the untamed garden that is about to subsume the house. “Not everyone does.”

Helen tells me she lives in an 18-acre woodland and invites me for tea. A few days later, I find myself trooping up through long, thick grass between trunks of rowan, ash, beech, oak and hazelwood, dodging the thorns of blackberry bushes.

At left, Swiss chard, oregano, loganberries, red currants and fennel from the garden. At right, Loganberries in the garden at Castlemaine, Co. Kerry, Ireland.

Hazelwood, and ‘a fire in my head’

I’m following Helen and her dog up through the woodland, where the Irish department of forestry has planted thousands upon thousands of trees. They have tied a white string from tree to tree to mark the path up through the coppery trunks of beeches. The forest thickens. The stone-lined pastures and the sound of the baa-ing sheep disappear. As we climb higher, the rope ends and the path nearly disappears into the blackberry thorns.

I muse aloud that I think hazelwood is Ireland’s tree. It’s because of Yeats that I think this — I went out to the hazel wood/Because a fire was in my head (“The Song of the Wandering Aengus”) — but that would be wrong. I remember trekking through the broken limestone of the Burren with a hazelwood hiking pole because it was the most naturally suited for a chaotic mix of peat and moss and slick stones. So the hazelwood was a good guess, but…

The protective qualities of rowan

Helen and I come to a line of rowans, spaced farther apart and set off from the thick path that plunges up the hill, in…