An Irish abbey where the grass is always warmer

This article is part of our special Design section on making the environment a creative partner in designing beautiful homes.

Between Holy Week and the demands of farm life, getting Sister Lily Scullion on the phone in April wasn’t easy. (“Sorry for the delay, been very busy lambing,” she wrote in an email.)

But at St. Mary’s Abbey in Glencairn comes a full schedule, where 29 sisters are busy every day with work and prayer; making handmade cards, candles and eucharistic bread; and maintaining the abbey’s grounds, which cover nearly 250 acres of County Waterford, near Ireland’s southeast coast.

And then there is the fuel for heating that has to be harvested.

In an effort to live sustainably, the sisters use not only solar panels to heat their buildings, but also a little-known but mighty form of elephant grass called miscanthus.

St. Mary’s is a Cistercian monastery, part of a branch of the Benedictine order. The land the sisters of the farm of St. Mary’s Abbey made was once part of a large monastic settlement called St. Carthage of Lismore, which was founded in the seventh century and was devastated by raids by Vikings and looting by the Normans .

St. Mary’s Abbey was founded in 1932 by the nuns of Holy Cross Abbey, a Cistercian order in the province of Dorset, England, who had numerous sisters from Ireland or with Irish roots.

Today the abbey is the only Cistercian monastery for women in Ireland. Despite being a closed order, it welcomes visitors from all over the world to its guest house, which is busy all year round. (“St. Benedict’s Rules for Monasteries” – written about AD 530 – contains an entire chapter on hospitality.)

When asked what kind of people would like to visit and stay at the guesthouse, Sister Lily replied, “Everyone.”

“They’re usually here to see what life is like, and they can attend the prayers” — which start at 4:10 a.m., seven days a week. “There is a great sense of peace throughout the area,” she says. said, noting that guests invariably comment on the serenity of the abbey grounds.

Sister Lily, a former All-Ireland camogie player (that’s an Irish ball-and-stick game) from County Antrim in Northern Ireland, aged 78, joined the order in 1980 and it was she who brought miscanthus to St. Mary’s Abbey brought.

She grew up on a farm and farming is in her blood. About ten years ago, she attended an information meeting with a Limerick company promoting miscanthus as a profitable crop. After years of struggling as a dairy farmer, the abbey took a keen interest in finding something new and profitable.

The plan to grow and sell miscanthus initially stalled because of the cost of transportation (“You’d have to pay a truck to take it somewhere,” Sister Lily said) and the lack of a robust marketplace for the harvest. But in the third year of planting, Sister Lily was able to sell some of the abbey’s harvest to a local company that makes briquettes for heating, and this gave her a new idea: to produce fuel for her own use.

The abbey raised money to buy an Ax Biotech boiler from Poland for 130,000 euros ($142,653), and they’ve been using the miscanthus they grow to heat the abbey’s buildings, including the six-bedroom guest house – ever since a distinctive building with single glass windows.

The miscanthus is harvested, dried and then roasted in the kettle. Asked if the boiler was efficient, Sister Lily said the first time she opened the door to the guesthouse, “I almost got knocked out by the heat.”

The sisters of St. Mary’s Abbey are not alone in their enthusiasm for miscanthus. Emily Hetonthe director of the Illinois Regenerative Agriculture Initiative at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, worked as a student in the lab of an Irish crop scientist named Stephen P. and spent two years researching the suitability of miscanthus for use in the United States for decades – in particular miscanthus x giganteus (Greef and Deu), the kind that burns St. Mary’s Abbey for fuel.

“The ‘x’ means it’s a hybrid,” Ms Heaton said, noting that this variety is like “the mule of the plant world”. Native to Asia, it is a sterile progeny that resulted from the mismatched union of two miscanthus species.

“One parent comes from the mountains and the other comes from the warm, wet zones in Asia, so it can grow in cold alpine environments,” Ms Heaton said. “It has a very wide growth range for a plant with little diversity.” This particular variety, she added, is not invasive.

All this makes it ideally suited to St. Mary’s Abbey, where the environmental ethos is not just sustainability, but harmony. Each green initiative their undertaking is done in the spirit of “contribution to our common home,” Sister Lily said, using the evocative phrase used by Pope Francis to describe our unique relationship with planet Earth in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’.

Though they work the land, make juice from the apples they harvest and gather wool from their lambs, St. Mary’s Abbey devotes 33 acres to pristine woodland, 10 acres to a pesticide-free enclosed garden, and 3.5 acres to wetlands . The remaining area is leased for tillage and used for miscanthus, cows and calves. Wildlife is abundant and there is a balance between the crops that humans need and the crops that support all the other species that call County Waterford home.