Flora of Ireland

The majority of Ireland's flora and fauna has only returned as the ice sheets retreated and sea level rose accompanied by post-glacial rebound when 10,000 years ago the climate began to warm.

At this time there was a land bridge connecting Wales and the east coast of Ireland since sea levels were over 100 metres lower than they are today (water being frozen into the ice caps covering northern Asia and North America).

Plants and animals were able to cross this land-bridge until about 7,500 years ago, when it was finally covered by the rising sea level as warming continued.

Mesolithic hunters entered Ireland around 8000 BC beginning human occupation and from the Neolithic landscape was progressively altered by agriculture, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The bogs formed at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, in the central lowlands of Ireland in basins of calcareous boulder clay.

Open water habitats include rivers, canals, lakes, reservoirs, ponds and, uniquely, turloughs.

Firstly, several hundred square kilometers of species-rich unimproved limestone grasslands and upland pastures grazed mainly in winter, a practice which removes potentially dominant grass and weed species.

Woods dominated by oak and birch, with lesser amounts of rowan, holly, hazel, yew and aspen are called western oakwoods and occur principally in the uplands of Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Quarries, gravel and sand pits, roads and railways, field boundaries, walls, waste ground and rubbish tips contain such plant species as common ragwort, pineapple weed, hairy bindweed, creeping buttercup, common daisy, catsear, coltsfoot, fat hen, nettle, redshank, germander speedwell, ivy-leaved toadflax, rosebay willowherb, great willowherb and wall pennywort.

[11] Threats to the flora include agriculture, drainage, housing developments, golf courses, mowing of roadside verges and introduced species.