Secrets Of The Irish Landscape - Season 1 (2013)

In this three part series, Derek Mooney will follow in the footsteps of one of Ireland's greatest unsung scientists Robert Lloyd Praeger. Standing by a small pool near Roundstone bog in the west of Ireland, any first-time European botanist would be both confused and startled by the mixture of plant types. The pools from which grow American Pipewort and Water Lobelia, are fringed by Spanish heathers, while the rocky knolls over which Siberian Juniper straggles are also abode to two Pyrenean plants; St. Dabeoc's heath and St Patrick's-cabbage. In the limestone wilderness of the Burren of northern County Clare, the Dense-flowered Orchid, far from its Mediterranean home, sends up its flowerspikes through carpets of the Arctic alpine Mountain Avens. Ever since this seemingly flora of contradictions was revealed, botanists have argued as to how it came about, and only now do we have the tools that allow us to begin to unravel that history.