Notwithstanding certain debates society is having about biology, facts are always best faced up to, however disappointing. But when it comes to travellers’ tales, there’s an honourable and harmless category of things that aren’t true but which really should be.
Casting a coin into Rome’s Trevi Fountain won’t guarantee you’ll return to Rome one day but people love doing it anyway. Saintly remains in European churches could secretly be chicken bones yet it harms no one that pilgrims feel moved to be in their presence. Queueing at Blarney Castle waiting to kiss the “lucky” stone is enjoyably blameless credulity.
At what point does one spoil the fun? Maybe ever so gently, starting here on the spectacular volcanic island of Madeira – where this column was written, and where the national flower is the fabulous bird of paradise, strelitzia reginae. Its witty, tropical bird’s head-shaped blue and orange flowers thrive here, to the point where it is mass-grown on traffic islands the way New Zealanders employ begonias and busy lizzies. The flowers are embroidered on patriotic banners and are a staple tourist shop emblem.
Except, if the “birds” could speak, it would not be in Madeiran Portuguese but in Zulu. Strelitzia is among many species introduced over hundreds of years of vigorous trade and settlement history, making themselves so winningly part of the scenery that they have muscled the native gems out of the limelight.
Tall, airy jacarandas (South American) cast their dreamy Gauloise blue bells on the elegant piazzas and boulevards of the capital, Funchal. Brilliant orange fire trees (Madagascan) are rival clickbait for tourists’ cameras. Technicolor bougainvillea (South American) shout from every vertiginous cliff face.
Souvenir T-shirts even glorify the agapanthus, another African import. (Such garments in New Zealand would be mandatorily over-printed with a great black cross.)
There are splendid natives, notably the 4m echium, Pride of Madeira, with its 30cm spikes of iridescent violet blue, and the gigantic biennial Madeiran geraniums. There are also hectares of stunning ancient laurel forest.
But like so many plants – and humans – the bird of paradise has colonised and endeared itself, pushing past the original locals and utterly taking the tourists’ eye. What can you do?
If readers can bear another spoiler, there’s a cracker concerning Ireland’s appealingly bleak Aran Islands – and not just the fact that Father Ted was not, as is widely believed, filmed there. The not-really-craggy island, Inishmore, was most famously the subject of one of the world’s earliest documentaries, Man of Aran, in 1934. Its director used dramatic licence to somewhat over-sell the islanders’ harsh subsistence fishing life.
But he was forensically scrupulous compared with German amateur textile historian Heinz Kiewe, who sparked the 1970s Aran sweater craze after misconstruing – some say outright making up – the history of the heavy, lanolin-rich “guernseys” common through northern maritime Britain. Neither special to Aran nor patterned according to mythic ancient codes, as Kiewe romantically insisted, they remain a modern classic garment despite his debunked scholarship.
“Dat scratchy old ting me mudder made me wear!” an Aran publican told the writer. He eagerly swapped his with an American tourist years ago. “Mad for it, he was,” he said, reflexively shrugging away the remembered itch.
Necessarily, the many guernseys sold on Aran today are machine-knitted in Asia, not handmade locally, since you could barely find two sheep to rub together there now.
Fair play: they’re warm, attractive and no longer so scratchy. Their patterns are lovely, but whether they’re based on centuries-handed-down insignia designed to identify the remains of tragically drowned fishermen … well, a bird of paradise motif might be as authentic as anything.
