Cotter - Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me

I t all comes down to the rain in the end. Of course it does. How could it be otherwise? Of the many clichs and myths surrounding Ireland, two of the most unavoidably true are that its a green place, and it rains a lot. These are facts. Its a simple equation. The rain makes the place green. That, and the temperate climate, which means the land never gets scorched in summer or frozen in winter. The damned grass never stops growing.

Coming in to land at Cork Airport, you will still occasionally hear stifled gasps and hushed exclamations at just how green the fields are down below. Not just from first-time tourists they expect it, theyve read the brochure but also from returning natives whove popped abroad for a spot of weekend shopping and martinis. We Irish may be a moneyed lot these days, but we still get excited at the sight of our little green home.

Those who know and care about these things say that green is the colour of hope. HmmI like that. Hope is a very strong force in life, nothing like the wishful thinking it is often taken for. It is a positive, purposeful energy, and in my green-tinged world, that connection makes sense.

Green has long been an obsession of mine. The colour, that is. My eye is drawn to flashes of green in every visual setting. Artwork, furniture, a row of books, crockery on a shelf or shoes in a shop window; clothes especially, whether on a body or hanging on a rack. I wear a lot of green, and feel comfortable with myself in green more than any other colour. I took to it quite young, glorying in its many shades and there are so many, far more than the forty that the hoary old Irish ballad glorifies.

Some greens are fun in a shocking way, most just merge into the background literally, in a rural context, of course. The ones in the dark green-black, olive-tinted sphere are almost soberly elegant. Almost. There are dozens that seem bearable when viewed in an indoor mirror, but in the light of day make you resemble a lost American tourist looking for Killarney. I actually love them all, in the way a good parent likes his children equally, or a cat lover pampers every one of her disdainful feline fold.

In the vegetable world, greens have long been lumped together. Mind you, now that I think of it, the political Greens are usually treated in the same way tolerated, patronised, thought of as vaguely good for you, an off-centre sideshow to the real focus of the political table.

Green vegetables, if they are eaten at all, have very often been taken as if they were medicine, a source of some necessary but unidentified nutrients, and swallowed as such without any expectation of pleasure. Eat your greens, that familiar old war-cry, translates into: Enjoy your dinner but eat that dull but healthy stuff I put on your plate too; its good for you. It was inevitable that this attitude led to greens being cooked as though they were medicine too, with little care given to how they might taste.

In the days before the arrival of modern calabrese broccoli to our shops, the range of greens eaten in most households where I grew up was narrow, and greens typically meant cabbage. Whatever was on the plate in the way of protein, the accompaniment was always cabbage, and the cabbage was good for you. It was no great punishment to me, however. I liked cabbage, but that was just luck, it wasnt why it was fed to me.

It seems to me there are plenty of families now who dont even bother to inflict greens on themselves in this way. Sometimes its a basic lack of health awareness, despite the burgeoning produce markets and the ubiquitous high-profile foodie campaigners on our TV screens. For those who do fuss over their nutritional requirements, the options for satisfying these has widened to include supplements, pills, fortified breakfast cereals and milk products, and other horrors. Believe in that lot if you will. Even if we were to accept that these fulfil all our nutritional needs, does it mean the end of usefulness of our traditional medicinal greens?

If anything, I think there is a certain freedom in it. A freedom to not bother, if youre that way inclined. But also, a freedom from thinking of greens as medicine. A freedom, if you like, to love them for the rich and complex flavours they bring to the table.

Eating greens for pleasure; now thats an interesting concept, and a real cause for hope. And yet, I only realised the extent of my own fascination with greens when teasing it out with another devotee. I have been fortunate in the last few years to be working with Ultan Walsh of Gortnanain Farm, a grower who, like me, has a passion for the food he produces. He grows vegetables that he loves, both as commercial crops and as food to use in his own kitchen. (In theory, he also grows what I want him to grow, even if its not something he cares for. Somehow we dont get much of a supply of those crops. I must get to the bottom of that one day)