[Andre Jute]

Patrick Turner, feeling homesick after being away from Ireland for
at least tree generations...

Actually, you're lucky to have been born in Sydney or Melbourne or
wherever it was, presumably not Canberra which is a "planned" city
built postwar, judging by the guvmint buildings. At least around
Sydney and Melbourne it is green. I was born in a desert where there
were two colours, red dust and dull olive green succulent plants with
spikes on the leaves and an a rash of needles on the fruit to keep the
vertebrates away. When I first came to Ireland (with a junior side to
play rugby), I silently counted the greens I saw, because of course
the jocks were blind to it. A few years later, when I was in
advertising I used to come to Ireland regularly to play golf. On one
occasion I brought one of my art directors with me because the client
I was playing with liked him. He and I shouted out the names of the
hundreds of different greens we saw as we drove through Galway and
Cork and Kerry. He was Lebanese; he'd never seen so many greens in his
life outside of a colour chart used for mixing printer's inks.
Actually, my pics give a very poor idea of what it is normally like in
the lanes because we're just at the end of an unusually cold winter,
and the council sent the hedgetrimmers down that lane I photographed a
week before I went, leaving lots of dead brown stalks -- normally the
hedgerows are another profusion of green reaching for the road like
the Day of the Triffids.