Something Green

Interview with Eamonn O'Sullivan, team member of the Galway Botanic Garden Project

The source of life on earth is an unknown. Every living organism shows the traits of a desire to survive, to adapt and to reproduce. The evolution of each living thing traces a path backwards through the history of that organism and is the evidence on which the world’s understanding of the current human condition is based. Skríobh hopes to explore the depths of knowledge and understanding, and to do that we interviewed Eamonn O’Sullivan to learn more about his role in the establishment of a botanic garden in Galway.

The Galway Botanic Garden Project was established as an entrant to the NUIG Student Union Enterprise Competition, with the aim of providing a botanic garden near the centre of Galway that would provide people with an insight into Ireland’s unique flora.

“We’ve got a lot of rare plants, we’ve got a lot of unusual plant communities and there’s not really a lot of awareness about that.” Eamonn and the team have proposed Galway as the site for a new botanic garden, because of the special position between the botanically interesting areas of the Burren to the south and Connemara to the north west. The west of Ireland receives large amounts of rainfall every year and rarely experiences temperature extremes, which creates distinctive conditions that occur in a tiny amount of places around the world. Eamonn points to northern hepatic mats, which are communities of mosses that have adapted to live in these conditions. “Some of the species only occur in a few sites in Ireland, Scotland, the Himalayas and Western China.” The team hope to highlight what makes the west of Ireland special on a global scale.

When asked about funding for the project, Eamonn acknowledged that 2012 in Ireland probably isn’t the most fortuitous time to be seeking funding, but said “it’s a good time for us, we’re just out of college; we’re enthusiastic. Is it a good time economically? Probably not, but what can you do?”. While it would have been easier to source capital for the project before Ireland’s economic collapse, he gives a sense that there are more important values to the project than money.

Ireland's hyper-oceanic ("feckin' awful wet")  contributes to Ireland's unique environment

The team hope that the function of the garden would extend beyond just showcasing Ireland’s flora. Looking to the Eden Project in Cornwall, the team plan that the garden will provide opportunities for education and research as well. “It’s a big undertaking to plan; you really want to get it right. It’s a weight on your shoulders trying to bring something like this to fruition but we’re collecting excited, knowledgeable, enthusiastic people as we go along”.

Image courtesy of Galway Botanic Garden Project

Eamonn looks to bogs in the west of Ireland to emphasise the point of why a botanic garden is needed. Schoenus nigricans is a type of bog rush which ordinarily grows in mineral rich, alkaline soil but manages to grow in the mineral poor,  acidic soils of western Irish bog lands. It’s a feat which is still poorly understood and has long been a source of astonishment to continental botanists. 

When the conversation moved to the topic of climate change, Eamonn gave the example of some of his colleague’s work, Rory Hodd. Rory, who is also involved in the garden project, modelled effects of climate change on some of these plants peculiar to Ireland that could be at risk. “They’ve a very specific microclimate requirement, and the zone that they can grow in is shifting north. They’ve a very poor dispersal and limited distribution; they only grow in north facing corries. They can’t really jump from one mountain range to the next so populations just decline. It’s probably to do with climate change”. It’s a small symbol of change in the context of the summer that experienced the lowest ice-levels ever at the North Pole.

The Galway Botanic Garden Project could be the Irish contribution to education on the vast uncertainties of climate change. While the function of the garden would be to showcase and educate, the reach of the project would go beyond that. It would stand as a monument to wildlife, to the remote, to the special and the hidden beauty of Ireland.