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Autumn in Greece

Earlier this month we spent two weeks in Greece, in the Outer or "Green"
Mani peninsula of the Peloponnese.

The autumn "springtime" was perhaps a little later than usual, but already
there were signs of green growth. The euphorbias were putting up their
first small autumn leaves. Some of the autumn bulbs were starting. There
were millions of Scilla autumnalis, insignificant as a single plant but
charming in extensive drifts, and a search would usually find a wide range
of colours from very occasional pure whites through the usual lavender blue
to quite deep almost reddish purples. The commonest crocus showing in the
part we were in was C. boryi, a strong white flower with more or less
yellow throat but white anthers. C. goulimyi, striking for its relatively
very long flower stem, was just starting - a handful of plants on our
arrival but a lot by the time we left. It seems to enjoy colonising places
where there's either a mass of stones on the surface (olive grove edges,
rubbly ancient donkey paths) or thicker leaf litter than other crocuses can
cope with (dips around oak trees), and again has quite a good range of
shades from pure white (rare) to a deep solid purple, though its usual soft
blue with three paler smaller inner tepals is perhaps the most attractive.
(It was nice to come home to cold England and find it flowering quite as
happily in our small "wild lawn" even with our frosty nights.)

There were quite a few colchicums up, including C. peloponnesiacum, C.
parlatoris and C. psaridis - we saw only one clump of this last one, a good
deep purply pink, and I think visually preferable to most colchicums
because of the way its leaves were well up alongside the flowers. Almost
certainly this particular clump was a single clone, running along on
stolons and forming a thick line about half a metre long.

The pretty little understated Narcissus serotinus was popping up here and
there, and there were patches of the weird Biarum tenuifolium - a
devilish-looking warped stiletto of deep chocolate-maroon poking up out of
baked clay.

Cyclamen graecum was well in flower and just starting to come into leaf -
the leaf patterns in this part of the Peloponnese seem to be richer in
their variety than anywhere else I've seen them. C. hederifolium was also
well in flower and quite often leaf - the huge tetraploid-looking plants
often with much bigger flowers than the plants in general cultivation, and
often strongly scented.

In people's gardens there was plenty of lush colour - the dominant
impression is of purple bougainvillea, a solid scarlet cultivar of Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis which is very common fairly near the coast, ripening
persimmon fruits with their shiny golden glow, the occasional rather
sinister Brugmansia (syn. Datura), jasmine and the blue Solanum jasminoides
tumbling over low walls, sprawly half-wild clumps of Marvel of Peru,
occasional bright golden-yellow masses of Macfadyena unguis-cati. The
lemons and oranges were starting to ripen, but a great many of the trees
were disfigured by a leaf miner which has been plaguing their young leaves
on epidemic scale for the last couple of years, and which local people are
very depressed about.

Alisdair Aird (Sussex, England)
Alisdair@compuserve.com
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