Gardening and the Weather

When I was here in 1984-85, I didn’t know what exactly to expect in the way of weather.  The winter that year turned out to be chilly and rainy.  I remember wearing a sweater every day under my trench coat, and that we were all very grateful for that year’s style of wearing Indian-style scarves around our necks as fashion accessories.  And one topic of conversation at the dinner table was where to find those gloves which have the tips of the fingers missing – which enabled the archaeologists to take notes with at least part of their hands preserved from the cold!

But I realize now that I was very unaware, that last time, of the weather patterns and the growing seasons in the Mediterranean, and was pretty much oblivious to the plant life around me.  Now that I have been gardening at home for some ten years, some things really jumped out at me:  the bushes, which lay dormant and dusty all summer, suddenly started putting out shoots in the fall, after the first good rain, and blossomed too:  all kinds of unfamiliar flowers in oranges, purples, blues and yellows.  We thrilled to discover cyclamen popping out between the ancient steps at Mycenae.  The gardeners came out en masse to prune, and great piles of hacked-off branches (you can’t dignify the process by any other words) lay on the curb, waiting for the garbage trucks.  In the public parks, the gardeners put out pansies, our first spring annual, in October.  The lemon and orange trees along the street started to drop the first of their ripening fruit.  The olive trees littered the sidewalks with ripe and juicy fruit too, unfortunately hard to distinguish from the dog poop on same said sidewalks.  And one of the trees, heretofore anonymous to me, identified itself as an almond tree by the nuts it bore!  One of the big street trees, which lost a great branch from old age, was identified to me as a carob tree by a passerby.  And there are even some tall trees with long skinny leaves and white and gray peeling bark, whose trunks look awfully like the rare and famous Pynchot Sycamores in the Farmington Valley, back in Connecticut – but but they turned out to be eucalyptus trees! 

I started to do some reading on the subject, and learned that the current Mediterranean climate is based upon an annual summer drought, and that planting generally happens in the fall, to take advantage of the winter rains (as with our winter wheat in North America).  Then the harvest comes in the spring or early summer.  One shocking fact that I learned from reading, and have confirmed by observation, is that mulching is just about unknown here:  the ground is raked of all plant debris, and is put out in the trash.  This means that the soil becomes poorer and poorer by year.  Of course, the plant life which succeeds here is one which can thrive in dry pebbly soil, summer drought, and lack of nutrients.  But there is a movement afoot to try to reform gardening practices to use native plants which do not require extra watering, to enrich the soil with composted organic matter, and to use ground covers not only to enrich the soil but also to prevent evaporation from the soil under the leaves, to improve the air quality in the cities, and to cool the city off.  Let's hope that they succeed!  The only places for comfort in the hot weather are the cool, leafy parks and gardens.

This year has been a mixed bag:  many chilly damp days (especially noticeable before they turned on the heat!) and some mild sunny days in the 60’s.  When I read about the nor’easter blanketing the U.S. East Coast with snow and ice in December, I gave thanks that I was walking around in shirt sleeves.  But then we were surprised on Valentine's Day weekend by a "snowstorm" -- they used the English word because there is nothing quite suitable in Greek -- which shut down the city for several days, and many of the suburbs near the mountains for longer. 

We have had many unseasonable days since then, and only the last few weeks revealed the full extent of the damage wrought by the snowstorm.  The lemons proved far less resilient than the oranges; the lush greenery in the parks froze and withered, and has since been cut back close to the roots.  Every street is filled with branches chopped from trees and bushes -- and not with a subtle hand, either.  The many potted plants on balconies are making their way to curb and dumpster.  Our potted geraniums and cactus at the school were among the victims.

I'm waiting now to see if the trees come back as lush as ever, or if they are permanent casualties of the frost.  And we are grateful for the daphne (laurel) trees, and the cypresses, which have kept some green in our landscape!  But others of the spring flowers are bursting forth against the dead branches. 

Spring will come eventually, as it always does.  And the almond trees are already in flower to prove it. 

 Almond tree near Mycenae, late February

         -- Edie Folta, March 7, 2004