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Native plants

Tony and Moira Ryan's point about niche habitats is very important. We're
gradually trying to establish native plants from elsewhere in the area in
our near-sea-level garden in Greece. (As it's a holiday home, this often
involves bringing cuttings back here to England to propagate and get
started, then taking the young plants out there.) If there's a poor habitat
match we stand very little chance of success. But even an apparently good
habitat match may miss some imperceptible but vital feature. For instance
we expected abundant germination of Delphinium staphysagria and of a local
lupin which we sowed generously on site - result, no visible germination of
the delphinium, and a very few weedy young plants of the lupin which
quickly expired.

By far our best successes are with more or less bulbous plants, perhaps
because their natural reserve-building processes give them a better "margin
of error". Certainly, these are the only plants we've had success at
bringing down from reasonably high altitudes.

Alisdair Aird (Sussex, England / Lefktron, Peloponnese)
Alisdair@compuserve.com
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