Wild Ground (2025)
(for string quartet)

Movements
I. Sí Gaoithe (Wind Swirls from the Ground or Fairy Winds)
II. Of Growth and Decay
III. Shapeshifting Dance (An Damhsa an Púca)

I’m a poor gardener but I can’t afford a landscaper (like all our neighbors seemingly) so I have to go to battle with the level of growth out the back of our house every year.  Recently I began to excuse my “curated” weed patches as rewilding.  But the so-called weeds, especially the dandelions and purple things I don’t know the name of, can be just as beautiful as the intentionally planted flowers.  The power of things to grow astonishes me every spring. Increasingly, it reminds me of how one of my Kerry grandmothers would invest all sorts of mythology in the land.  She was a small farmer and so she had a deep knowledge of it.  We couldn’t play with water outside after a certain time for fear of disturbing the fairies, or walk on certain mounds in the main field, again for fear of disturbing fairies.  Fierce little flurries of wind off the ground were the disturbed fairies and so on.  My limited experience with my back garden tells me she was right to hold the land in such reverence.  The three movements of this piece — Sí Gaoithe (Fairy Winds); Of Growth and Decay and The Shapeshifter’s Dance (An Damhsa An Púca) — honor Nana’s cultivation of and at the same time respect and fear for the wild power of the ground.

—Donnacha Dennehy