Why Irish-Grown Plants are Best

There are all sorts of reasons for buying Irish grown plants, and caring about the environment is only one of them. There is an increasing interest in where our food comes from, and ‘food miles’ has become an issue for many shoppers. The numerous farmers’ markets around the country are driving home the point that local is best. Is this the time that the horticultural industry – designers, landscapers, gardeners and retailers – should start applying some of the same principles to where their plants come from?

There are many reasons for buying Irish grown plants. First of all, it takes less handling to get them from the nursery to their final home in the ground. A Japanese maple from New Zealand or a mature, specimen plant from Italy has many more miles behind it – and therefore a far greater embodied energy - particularly as far as oil consumption is concerned. Secondly, plants grown locally have a far greater tolerance to the vagaries of our climate. They have grown up with the wind, the lack of summer heat, the salty air near the coast, and so on. Thirdly, local plants mean local jobs; nursery producers are a valuable part of the horticultural industry, and for them to suffer or decline while oil and transport are cheap may leave us with a depleted skills-base when the cost of transport rises beyond a critical point. And finally, there is the diversity which a local or small-scale nursery can offer: the chance seedling that is propagated, trialled and sold. These nurseries are not driven by economies of scale – and therefore offer a greater choice of material.

The number of plants being imported into Ireland is increasing. They come in from Italy, Holland, Germany, Britain, even New Zealand. They can be viewed by the buyer one week and delivered the next. Some garden centres import directly, whilst others buy from wholesalers. dyg cannot promise that every plant we sell is Irish-grown. But we can promise that the vast majority of them are, and that we get over 90% of them from reputable, high quality Irish nurseries. Although it may seem like a small step, buying plants online takes cars off the road by reducing numerous small journeys. We can fit many plants, pots and bulky items into one large vehicle and deliver to multiple addresses in one journey.

An apparent selling point of many of the imported plants is their size: Magnolia grandiflora, Quercus ilex, and Phyllostachys aurea are easily ordered at over five metres in height. Mature olive trees come in looking as ancient as anything you’ll see on the slopes of an Italian olive grove. Even perennials come in larger containers – five litres as compared to the standard two litres.

I would argue that these large specimen plants will never equal a locally-grown equivalent. They have been clipped prior to shipping to make them more transportable – yet in the case of a tree, this will ruin the branch structure for a lifetime, unless the tree will always be maintained as topiary. The five or six metre culms on an imported Phyllostachys are difficult to achieve with our relatively mild summers; yet how many new culms of an equivalent height will be produced once it gets into the ground over here? Perennials in larger pots invariably do less well; the greater the root mass and quantity of growing medium the less the likely the plant is to send out new roots to try to fend for itself. A smaller plant hits the ground running and has a lesser requirement for irrigation.

Time has always been considered the great extra dimension in a garden - the wait for maturity, the evolution and the constant development. Like the hunt, it’s all about the chase, not the kill at the end. With the wait done away with, it’s bypassing the process and missing the point entirely. Knowing where our plants come from should be a priority, and in an age of depleting energy reserves, we should be doing what we can to lessen the impact of our trade.