It was our fourth day in Nunavut cruising aboard the MV Sea Adventurer. After our initial visits to Iqaluit and Pangnirtung, we were now heading towards Cape Dyer, which in a few days would be roughly our departure point across the Davis Strait to Sisimiut, Greenland.
Fog blanketed the Arctic, which meant, for the captain, it was slow going.
In the lounge, Heidi Langille, who resides in Canada’s capital city Ottawa, gave an afternoon lecture on what it was like to be an “urban Inuit”.
That evening after dinner, there was music on deck and Heidi and our other Inuit cultural emissaries demonstrated some traditional games of strength…..
….. while we cheered them on.
The next morning, the sun was warm on the east coast of Baffin Island as we made our way up the appropriately-named Sunneshine Fjord – also seen as Sunshine Fiord in some references….
….and dropped anchor.
The zodiacs ferried us to a wet landing on shore. It’s interesting that, if you’re a resource staffer on an Adventure Canada expedition, you must also know how to captain a zodiac. That goes for (now retired) art and culture director Carol Heppenstall, standing in the blue life-vest to the left of (now retired) expedition leader Stefan Kindberg.
When you land on an unoccupied shoreline in Nunavut, there’s a good chance that even though there are no human occupants, there may well be polar bears. Thus, our expedition leader Stefan Kindberg carried both a handgun and rifle. Fortunately, he’s never had to use them, and commented dryly: “You don’t ever want to have to shoot a polar bear in Canada. Too much paperwork!”
We were invited to explore the landing area. We could stay on the beach, work our way around the lower slopes, or climb right to the top.
My husband Doug (below) elected to stick near the shore. I was happy we’d purchased new walking poles….
….and, again, I was delighted with my new rubber boots. Wearing them, I was able to shake up a lot of green algae in the shallow water of this intertidal zone.
I loved looking at the seaweed. So many different species….
….. each with its own ecological community….
….. and adapted to the seasonal mix of salt and fresh glacial meltwater in the fjord.
Some of our group elected to climb to the summit, but I was most anxious to botanize on the lower slope.
This part of Sunneshine Fjord was a perfect place to be. The moraines were gently sloped, the sandy beach quite wide, the fjord deep enough for our ship, and these slopes – so monotonously featureless and olive-brown as the ship sails past them – were absolutely brimming with plant life.
Unless you get closer, you might not guess that those lighter areas on this hillside….
…… are colonies of mountain avens (Dryas integrifolia) wreathed in creeping willow shrubs.
Or that these paler drifts….
…… are Arctic heather (Cassiope tetragona), sometimes punctuated with hairy lousewort (Pedicularis hirsuta).
Here’s a closer look at hairy lousewort to illustrate the trait that earned its name.
Morning dew was still on this pair of natives: Arctic harebell (Campanula uniflora) with large-flowered wintergreen (Pyrola grandiflora).
Arctic cinquefoil (Potentilla hyparctica) is a circumpolar species, also native to Alaska, the Yukon and Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.
Arctic blueberry or bilberry (Vaccinium uliginosum) would bear its fruit in August – with only birds and small mammals to appreciate it.
A butterfly was nectaring on moss campion (Silene acaulis).
Arctic poppies (Papaver spp.) were in flower….
….. and dwarf fireweed (Chamerion latifolium), too.
Moss had colonized the rocky outcrops in the damper areas.
There was runoff from the small glaciers beyond the summit. Though Sunneshine Fjord is not directly related to Baffin Island’s Penny Ice Cap, it has (like all parts of the Arctic) drainage from abundant snow and ice on the upper elevations.
Here we see Arctic willow (Salix arctica) clinging to a boulder beside the waterfall.
Arctic willow grew everywhere on our expedition. One of thirteen species native to Nunavut, it grows farther north than any of the other willows and is the most common willow on Arctic islands. Usually prostrate, it can also change its growth habit in certain circumstances and become erect, with a height up to 1 metre (3 feet). Its hairy leaf reverse is a distinguishing characteristic, versus the similar-looking northern willow (Salix arctophila), which has glabrous or smooth leaves. It can be very long-lived, with a Greenland specimen dated to 236 years. Its leaves are edible and Inuit people traditionally peeled and chewed the roots of this plant they call suputiksaliit to relieve toothache – recalling the general pharmaceutical use of salicylic acid derived originally from certain Salix species as aspirin (now made synthetically). When Arctic willow seeds ripen, they are surrounded by fluffy hairs (willow cotton) that help them disperse on the wind.
I spotted some bearberry willow (Salix uva-ursi) as well, but I was most interested in the beautiful black lichen on this rock, sensibly called black lichen (Pseudephebe minuscula, formerly Alectoria).
Here you can see how black lichen develops and grows. The study of the growth rate of lichens, by the way, is called lichenometry.
Some of the resource personnel were capturing the scene on the lower slope. This is Kenneth Lister, now retired as a curator of Arctic anthropology at the Royal Ontario Museum.
Dennis Minty, below, is a well-known photographer on many Adventure Canada expeditions.
It was challenging to walk back to the beach through the glacial debris field.
This cobble sandbar jutting out from the beach was raised enough that I was able to make our ship look like it was sinking.
The air on the last day of July was quite warm and wisps of advection fog came and went above the cold Arctic waters.
Walking back to the beach where the zodiacs waited, I was fascinated by the stunning rock formation below, exposed by the ocean waves (and perhaps glacial ice?) along the fjord. It was beautiful and mysterious. Until this week, I hadn’t made a serious effort to discover more. This is, after all, a very isolated part of Nunavut: perhaps some Inuit fishermen come in here, the odd scientific expedition, and a handful of summer adventure cruises over the decades,(sea ice and weather willing).
The rocks, though fractured, were beautifully banded, similar to the banded gneiss, below, that I love photographing on the highway near our cottage on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto. A Precambrian rock, it is part of the Grenville Province (Muskoka Domain, Moon River Lobe) and is dated to about 1.4 billion years before the present, i.e. the Paleoproterozoic Eon (literally “before animals”).
Could my Sunneshine Fjord rocks be that old? I reached out via email to some geologists whose names I found online associated with the Cumberland Peninsula or Cape Dyer just north of the fjord. At one time during the Cold War between the west and Russia (1958-92), Cape Dyer was a radar station and part of the DEW Line, the Distant Early Warning System. Today it’s one of 40 sites across the north that has had to be cleaned up (at a cost of $575 million) to get rid of contaminated soil, fuel tanks and other debris.
I received a nice email in response from Dr. John T. Andrews, Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. He had done glacial/climate change research near Cape Dyer and wasn’t sure about my rock, but kindly sent me the abstract for another geologist’s paper on the region’s volcanic history. “This paper describes the field relations of Tertiary basalts which are preserved as small patches intermittently along the coast for 90 km northwest from Cape Dyer, Baffin Island. The flat-lying, subaerial lavas generally rest directly on the Precambrian basement but in some localities a thin sequence of terrestrial sediments intervenes between the basement and the volcanics. Where the sediments occur, the overlying volcanics tend to be divisible into a lower unit of subaqueous volcanic breccia and an upper sequence of subaerial flows. In age, stratigraphic position and magma-type, these volcanics strongly resemble those of the basalt province of west Greenland. A model is presented for the generation of both provinces in a single volcanic episode, related to the opening of Labrador Sea – Baffin Bay by continental drift.”
Wow! A volcanic episode had ruptured Greenland from Baffin Island? I suppose I should have studied up on the basic tectonic relationships of the Eastern Arctic before going further. But my banded rocks in Sunneshine Fjord didn’t look like the columnar basalt formations from the Columbia River Basalt Flood, below, that I had photographed in northeast Oregon two years ago and written about in my blog on Oregon’s Thomas Condon Paleontology Center.
When I enlarged the map, I thought I could spot the exact area with the cobble sandbar that we had visited, marked with a red arrow below!
Detail from http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2013/rncan-nrcan/M183-1-6-2011-eng.pdf
The lead author was geologist Dr. Mary Sanborn-Barrie. I sent off an email with photos of my rocks, but didn’t hear anything back right away. Maybe she was in the field, out of wifi range, dubious about such a random email from someone she didn’t know? But then I received a reply from her and it made me so happy. Because my rocks were old, really really old!
Hi Janet
What a beautiful exposure of rocks you were able to explore on the shoreline. Our mode of transport was helicopter drop-off and then walking all day, so we rarely (if ever) got to map such gorgeous wave-washed exposures.
Actually your photographs appear to be of the oldest rocks in the region, rather than the youngest! They appear representative of the deformed and layered Archean (A) tonalite gneiss (tg) basement (unit Atg in the legend below) that underlies much of Cumberland Peninsula and which is dated at two localities at 2,990 million years old and 2,940 million years old. The pale grey layers are foliated tonalite and any biotitic and/or mica-rich layers (unit Asp in the legend below) are likely even older sediments that were intruded by the tonalite. Upon closer inspection, such mica-rich may also contain garnet and/or silky silvery sillimanite – both minerals diagnostic of high-alumina sedimentary rocks.
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Here’s an enlargement of the legend to which she referred:
Detail of legend http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2013/rncan-nrcan/M183-1-6-2011-eng.pdf
I was so happy I’d made closeup images of the rock layers, below. Imagine! These Archean rocks at 2.99 – 2.94 Ga (Giga annum or billion years) are twice as old as the rocks on the highway near my cottage, from an eon whose name comes from the same root as “archaic” stretching back 4 billion years.
I had photographed the upper slope from the beach, below, and all I could see was more of the same, but there were, in fact, some much younger rocks in places at the top of the cliffs on Sunneshine Fjord. Dr. Sanborn-Barrie included information about those rocks as well, as she continued in her email (below my photo).
“These tectonically layered rocks (as opposed to the bedded (primary layering=strata) observed in the Tertiary sequence) underlie (that is, they are low on the cliffs) the much younger, unconformably overlying Tertiary basalts that erupted about 60-55 million years ago during spreading of the Baffin basin.“ She also enclosed a photo of herself examining those overlying Tertiary basalts with a view across the fjord to basalts atop the ancient rock.
Photo of geologist Mary Sanborn-Barrie by mapping co-leader, geologist Michael Young
And she provided an info-card using a photo from Sunneshine Fjord showing what is meant in geology by “unconformably” or “unconformity” (n.): meaning “a series of younger strata that do not succeed the underlying older rocks in age or in parallel position, as a result of a long period of erosion or nondeposition.” Thus, we don’t know what happenened here between 2.9 Ga and 60-55 Ma because all the physical evidence for that vast period has disappeared. That break in the record is called a “hiatus”.
Photo courtesy Dr. Mary Sanborn-Barrie, Research Canada
Returning now to that wonderful last day of July in 2013, it was time for us to climb into the zodiacs, board the ship and take our leave of Sunneshine Fjord.
It was so warm outdoors that a barbecue lunch was served on the rear deck……
…… complete with grilled chicken and steak.
Passing an iceberg…..
…..we bade farewell to the coast of Baffin Island, Nunavut and Canada.
Hours later, I was happy I hadn’t consumed too much wine at that lovely lunch because I was flat on my back in my bunk, having taken a motion sickness pill and given up on trying to read. Every now and again, I’d pull myself up to look out the window at the 9-foot swells that had the ship rocking back and forth like a slow amusement ride… for hours and hours. My husband, who doesn’t get seasick, returned from dinner and announced cheerily: “Well, you’re in the majority! And some people left the dining room in a big hurry!” I groaned and closed my eyes and thought of a young Charles Darwin, often seasick in his hammock on his five-year voyage aboard The Beagle. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor,” he wrote to a cousin in 1835.
Fortunately, morning did come, the seas calmed, and we arrived on a sunny August 1st on the west coast of Greenland. Coming up in my next blog: Sisimiut.
I spent a few lovely weeks this autumn touring Greece with a group of rock gardening enthusiasts from the North American Rock Garden Society. I will admit up front that I’m not really a rock gardener. I do love trees but up until this trip, I didn’t particularly identify with plants that huddle near the earth’s surface nestled up against limestone shelves or serpentine outcrops or hanging on for dear life in an alpine scree. It might be a physical thing on my part (knees, back): when others kneel or crouch or prostrate themselves completely (like my North Carolina friend and true rock gardener Cyndy Cromwell, below, with whom I bonded on a 2018 garden tour of New Zealand)….
…I just…. stand there… looking down.
But rock garden plants aside, I am a photographer of all types of plants with my own stock image library, including lots of bulb photos. So searching for the “fall-blooming bulbs of Greece” to add to my inventory sounded like good fun.
And best of all, the tour was to be led by someone who had been a Facebook friend for six years, a young Athens native whom we plant geeks had nicknamed the ‘King of Lamiaceae’ for his special affection for the mint family, the salvias, teucriums, catmints, thymes, etc. that grow in the Mediterranean and similar climates the world over. But apart from the mints his knowledge of the entire plant world was prodigious, he had a good sense of humour, and having done his Masters degrees in California and England he was fluent in English. Though his real name is Eleftherios Dariotis, Lefteris for short, I know him by his Facebook handle, Liberto Dario. Either way, “freedom” is the theme.
If you’re not “on Facebook”, you might not know that there are thousands of interest groups that cater to your special passion, whether it’s mushrooms or madrigals or the Monkees. Needless to say, my groups revolve around the plant world. Sometime in 2013 I decided to inject a little fun into the “Plant Idents” group for which I am an administrator by using my photo library to create plant puzzles, mixing up plant photos, placing them in a numbered montage, having people guess their identities via the Latin genus name, then unscrambling the correct genus initials to solve an anagram. So instead of “Words with Friends”, we played “Plant Words with Friends”. I called them Botanagrams. A little complicated, admittedly, but they were heady fun that required everyone to make rapid-fire guesses and exchange geeky, comic asides. And woe to those with slow internet service! A few years ago I wrote a blog celebrating the puzzles, so I could remember what fun they were. Of all the nerdy ‘puzzle people’ I met and continue to call friends – Amir, Jo, Rebecca, Amy, David, Amrita, Kathy, Alys, Rosemary, Margaret, Deb and so many more – Liberto Dario usually got the really hard ones. (P.S. the anagram solution to the one below was “the vital sexy bits” for plant reproductive parts.)
Sometimes I changed up the puzzle. The one below didn’t have an anagram to solve, but was all-Lamiaceae with honey bees aboard.
So… on a night late this October, we all met at an outdoor cafe in Athens for the introductory tour dinner — and the virtual Facebook friendship became actual. Thanks to Cyndy for the photo of jet-lagged me (I hadn’t slept in more than 30 hours) and our tour guide, Liberto. As it happens, I’ve turned quite a few Facebook friendships into actual friendships: a lovely dinner in Sebastapol CA; a personalized garden tour in Santa Barbara; a fun 7-person nursery meet-up in Portland OR; and a delightful 5-person garden picnic in Seattle WA.
THE TRIP JOURNAL
Bright and early the next morning (and for 11 mornings after), it was on the road to search for the autumn-blooming flora of Greece. We stopped along the busy highway northwest of Athens beside a woodland of scrubby kermes oak (Quercus coccifera), under which we found our first Cyclamen graecum, below, with oak behind it. This little drought-tolerant oak gets its common name from a Sanskrit word krim-dja, which is also the root of the words crimson and carmine. Why? Because it is the source of an ancient red dye; indeed it is a word for red in the Persian language. However it’s not the oak itself that yields the dye, but an insect that feeds on the oak, specifically the kermes insect or κόκκος. In her book “Color – A Natural History of the Palette’, Victoria Finlay writes: “Dioscorides described how kermes was harvested with the fingernails – scraped carefully from the scarlet oak it lives on. But curiously he described it as ‘coccus’, meaning ‘berry’, and did not explain that it was an insect at all.” The kermes trade routes would weave their way through the ancient world: Spain paid its taxes to Rome in sacks of kermes from the oak they called “chaparro” and the Turks used it in carpet-dying.
In little meadows in forests of Greek fir (Abies cephalonica) at the base of Mount Parnassus, we found Colchicum parnassicum.
Later, in a coppice (charcoal) forest of Hungarian oak (Quercus frainetto) near Mount Kallidromo, we thrilled at masses of Cyclamen hederifolium emerging from fallen leaves. I loved this ecological partnership.
The next day, our hotel near Kalambaka was our base as we visited the otherworldly monasteries at the UNESCO site Meteora. It’s not easy to describe these sedimentary rock formations topped with buildings erected in the 15th-17th centuries, so I’ll just show you.
It’s easy to see why so many tourists make the trip to this part of Greece.
Later that day we travelled to a rock face in the foothills of the Koziakas mountain area of the central Pindos range near a busy, one-lane bridge over the Portaikos River. Did I mention that rock gardeners like to live dangerously?
But there were tiny roadside treasures…. common in Greece, but new to us.
Returning towards Kalambaka, we stopped at the base of Mount Olympus which was shrouded in clouds. The home of the gods in mythology – and a national park – it actually spans 52 peaks including the highest, Mytikas (2917 metres-9570 feet) and Stefani or “Zeus’s Throne” (2909 metres-9544 feet). As others searched the area for bulbs, I kicked around pieces of marble, which were plentiful, as I thought about all the marble monuments and temples we would see in Greece. And I inhaled the sweet, minty fragrance of calamint (Clinopodium nepeta), which we found at many locations, usually being foraged by a big bumble bee.
The first day of November arrived and we were in Smokovo looking “for bulb treasures on the serpentine rocks”. Nobody said anything about looking for bulb treasures in the pouring rain.
The little crocus below was our goal…. Crocus cancellatus subsp. mazziaricus, but it cancelled its showing amidst the serpentine rocks for obvious reasons. And despite having received the memo about waterproof shoes from our host, I failed to act on it. Fortunately, our lunch venue had a roaring fireplace which helped dry a lot of socks and shoes.
Returning to Athens, we stopped to pay tribute at Thermopylae where Leonidas and the Spartans fought the Persians under Xerces in 480 BC. “ The Persian army, alleged by the ancient sources to have numbered over one million, but today considered to have been much smaller (various figures are given by scholars, ranging between about 100,000 and 150,000) arrived at the pass in late August or early September. The vastly outnumbered Greeks held off the Persians for seven days (including three of battle) before the rear-guard was annihilated in one of history’s most famous last stands. During two full days of battle, the small force led by Leonidas blocked the only road by which the massive Persian army could pass. After the second day, a local resident named Ephialtes betrayed the Greeks by revealing a small path used by shepherds. It led the Persians behind the Greek lines. Leonidas, aware that his force was being outflanked, dismissed the bulk of the Greek army and remained to guard their retreat with 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians, fighting to the death.” (Wiki)
Saturday was all about Athens, specifically the suburb of Paiania. We began with a tour of Liberto’s two gardens, the first (unirrigated) at the lovely, peach-pink stucco summer home owned by his Chicago Uncle Sam Sianis, aka the ‘goat garden’. By the time summer rolls around, they can park their car on top of Liberto’s clever spring-bulbs-and-annuals meadow, left, which by then has finished flowering.
And why is it called the goat garden? Well, in what might be the most powerful goat-related story in major league sports, it was a Sianis family billy goat that evidently put a curse on Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs for 71 years, from October 6, 1945 (game 4 of the World Series that year) to November 2, 2016, when the curse was finally broken and the Cubs won the title. Turns out if you don’t ‘let the goat in’ all kinds of bad baseball karma is going to come raining down on you. It would take me the rest of my blog to tell you the story of the billy goat curse, so rather than explain it as Liberto is doing to folks on the trip, below….
Anybody who has run out of space in which to grow plants knows how wonderful it would be to be able to adopt an empty garden. Since his relatives are only in residence for their vacation each summer, Liberto has been free to create gardens around the house to grow his favourite plants for his mail order seed business. But I’m pretty sure the family feels lucky to be surrounded by such beauty each summer.
I especially loved these silver beauties, moon carrot, Seseli gummiferum, top and partridge feather, Tanacetum densum, below.
We were all able to sniff an aromatic leaf of sideritis, used to make traditional Greek mountain tea.
Spring would be truly lovely in this garden, but I was able to find a few flowers in bloom in November, below. Top row, from left: Eriocephalus africanus, Crocus speciosus, Salvia africana-lutea, Teucrium fruticans ‘Ouarzazate’, Bottom row, from left: Iris unguicularis, Scabiosa (Lomelosia) crenata subsp. dalaportea, Cyclamen hederifolium, Epilobium canum.
Then we headed a short distance away to Liberto’s family home and the large garden he’s made behind it: the salvia garden. Here we wandered amongst lush grasses, shrubs, small trees, citrus and many perennials from around the world, all adapted to the Mediterranean climate….
…. but especially the stars of his garden: so many different kinds of sages (Salvia species). I counted 87 taxa on his salvia seed list.
There are other plants, of course. Here are a few that caught my eye, including blue-flowered Pycnostachus urticifolia, bright red Erythrina x bidwillii, golden Tecoma stans, and some delicious-looking grapefruit.
Succulents and xeric bromeliads were displayed on a table….
…. and a small pond hosted aquatic plants.
Guests listened to Liberto explaining about his mail order business of seeds and bulbs. Those stairs lead to the production side of the garden. Let’s go up.
A series of glass cold frames holds tender bulbs from around the world. Everywhere are little pots filled with grit-rich soil and all manner of exquisite flora. It is a living library of the plant collector’s passion. To read more about what inspires him in the plant world, read this 2016 interview on Plinth. If the sun hadn’t been shining so brightly at a difficult time of day (photographers say this all the time) and if the garden hadn’t been full of wandering people, and if we didn’t have a full schedule of visits later, I would have enjoyed chronicling Liberto’s garden more closely, as I did his good friend Panayoti Kelaidis’s garden in Denver earlier in the year. But such is life.
The genus Oxalis is a special favourite; he grows more than 150 species.
Plants, plants, plants….. maybe for seeds? Plant sales? He was too busy to ask.
From this well-organized room, seeds of his favourite plants will find their way throughout the world.
Our next stop in Paiania was the Vorres Museum where Liberto has been working to transform the gardens to a more sustainable model. He joined his friend Nektarios Vorres, grandson of the founder of the museum and president of the foundation that now runs it. I wrote a blog about this lovely place with its Canadian connection.
Then it was a walk up Mount Hymettus with its view of Attica through wild olive branches heavy with fruit.
And the hillside bore seedhead reminders of the wild Greek mountain thyme (Thymbra capitata) that brings bees to nectar in order to yield the famous Hymettus honey. Fortunately, I did come home with a gift of some sweet thyme honey.
Sunday brought us to various environments in Attica: a rocky scramble overlooking the blue Aegean; a stroll along the seashore where asters were growing; then a walk through a parched, trash-strewn meadow where we found tiny bulbs growing in the dry grasses. From left, Crocus cartwrightianus (progenitor of the saffron crocus); Spiranthes spiralis, Greece’s only autumn-flowering orchid; tiny autumn squill, Prospero autumnale; and diminutive Colchicum cupanii.
Then we drove south to Cape Sounion. Before visiting the nearby temple, we enjoyed a lunch of fresh fish – calamari, sardines and bream – overlooking the Saronic Gulf of the Aegean. OCD Patients May Seek Help From Dermatologists. purchase viagra online Regular exercises levitra cialis have proved to be the shortcut to come out of the disease. It is advisable that discount viagra pharmacy should be taken at-least 30 minutes before the sexual intercourse to take place. Are you an extremely busy person and spend almost 24 hours at your office? If such is the case generic tadalafil india then you should implement the application of this medicament but only after consulting the physician.
Then it was a walk up to the beautiful Temple of Poseidon (440 BC), where I was photographed capturing a tiny specimen of yellow Sternbergia lutea in the foundation rocks.
By the time we drove back downtown, the hour was late but we were fortunate to pay a short visit to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, starting with the spectacular building….
…… then a walk down to ground level through the sprawling, night-lit gardens. Definitely a spot that merits a return.
On November 4th we drove from Athens to the Peloponnese with our first stop overlooking the Corinth Canal. It was completed in 1893 and joins the Gulf of Corinth to the north with the Saronic Gulf of the Aegean Sea to the south, thus turning the Peloponnese Peninsula into an island. I am an armchair geology geek and to see this slab of cut limestone was a treat. It is 6.3 kilometres (4 miles) long and 70 metres (21.3 feet) wide at its base with a depth of 8 metres. The 63-metre deep (206 feet) deep limestone and earthen walls are actually the canal’s weak point, since they are affected by water from tides and boat wash and the occasional earthquake, leading to frequent landslides and long closures (4 years in the 1920s) to clean out rock and earth. Without the canal, the 11,000 ships (the largest width is 58 feet) that make the trip through it annually would need to travel an additional 300 nautical miles to reach their destination.
A long day of travel with rain and darkness at its end held a bright spot, and one of my favourite places on the tour. For who wouldn’t love a hillside overlooking olive fields dotted with wild heather (Erica manipuliflora), its botanical name commemorating its home on the Mani Peninsula. And there were bees and beehives, too; a few days later, a little lost in Athens while walking home by myself from the Acropolis, I bought a jar of heather honey to help me remember this place.
The next morning, from the beach in front of our pretty little stone hotel in Gytheion on the eastern shore of the Mani Peninsula, I looked out over the Lakonian Gulf, somewhat reluctantly climbing into the van to head to the western side of the peninsula. Our hotels were so pretty, and the days all started early.
During a brief stop to scour a steep cliff on the road out of Gytheion, Liberto met a group of French botanists and exchanged the latest in plant spotting. Only in Greece.
Less than an hour later, we were pulled over on a farm road between olive groves, where the harvest was taking place…..
…. and we happily photographed, from left, Allium callimischon ssp.callimischon, Colchicum psaridis and Crocus boryi.
But I especially cherish the memory here of the goat bells or kypria, a little musical interlude I followed down the road until the shepherd’s dogs let me know I’d come far enough. Listen….
High on a ridge overlooking the gulf, we found a little field of the beautiful, purple Crocus goulimyi. But I was also fascinated by the valonia oaks (Quercus ithaburensis ssp. macrolepis) that line the road, and with their big, frilly acorns, which are used traditionally in tanning. From then on, I would remember the crocuses as “the ones that grew with the oaks”. Crocus goulimyi is named for Constantine Goulimis (1886-1963), a lawyer and amateur botanist who wrote Wild Flowers of Greece.
Then we drove to our lovely hotel in Areopoli in the Deep Mani Peninsula, Ktima Karageorgou, set under a massive peak of the Sagias Mountains, part of the Taygetos range.
While the others investigated the mountain I played hooky and took a very chilly swim. Before dinner, we enjoyed a slide presentation of Greek bulbs and flora by Liberto.
The next morning, November 6th, we drove south on the peninsula and within the hour came to an enchanting meadow filled with Crocus niveus in a mix of white and pale purple forms. And there was lovely Cyclamen graecum here, too, near the silvery leaves of Astragalus lusitanicus.
Driving further south, we visited a ‘ghost village’ called Vathia, a collection of stone towers from the 18th and 19th centuries, each built by a Maniot family to act not merely as a home but as a defensive fortress against their neighbours. During the early 19th century when the population numbered roughly 300, poverty forced many of the inhabitants to abandon their rural life and move to the cities.
Today, a few of the towers seem to be inhabited – I saw a satellite dish and curtains on one. But most are still in ruin and likely not economic to renovate in this location. An evocative stop.
We were nearing the bottom of the peninsula when we made another stop along the road to botanize. The slopes of the mountains are etched with hundreds of stone-walled terraces. That was the way of agriculture here, a very hard life, now mostly abandoned. In the field we saw lots of painted lady butterflies nectaring on yellow fleabane (Dittrichia viscosa) and Liberto gave me a handful of fragrant Greek sage (Salvia fruticosa), another herb used to make traditional tea
We reached our destination at the bottom of the Deep Mani: Cape Tainaro (Tainaron, Matapan), the southernmost point of mainland Greece and a beautiful place to spend the next few hours. Here were the strange remains of the Sanctuary and Death Oracle of Poseidon Tainarios, top below, presumably at one time a place to present offerings to forestall death by misadventure on the ocean.
I found a few tiny fall bulbs (Prospero autumnale and Colchicum parlatoris) and fennel in the grasses here, along with abundant verbascum seedheads and Crithmum maritimum by the sea.
While others took the long hike to the lighthouse at the point, I decided to stay behind and dip my toes into the ocean at exactly the point where the Aegean Sea meets the Ionian Sea. If you want to see what I saw there, wading in the sea near the fishboats at Cape Tainaro, you might want to watch my musical video of the beautiful rivers and seashores I saw in Greece. It’s not long, and there’s a nice little splash from time to time.
This was also the afternoon when I lost my cellphone. After fruitless searches of the van and my room, I felt a little despondent as I’d used it for so much photography. But a late night email from my husband in Canada to Liberto revealed that a tech-savvy woman in the village had found it sitting on the stone wall we had last visited to look for crocuses and found my contact information. We would visit her business the next morning on our way out of town to pick it up. When I tried to give her more than a gift of honey, she refused. “Hospitality!” she exclaimed. Indeed, hospitality.
That night in Areopoli the group had a post-dinner Greek dance lesson. It was a great success. There might have been some ouzo involved….. I might have bought the bottle…. I might have been pouring shots for the group….
On November 7th, we made our way from the dry Lakonian part of the Mani Peninsula to the Messinian Mani. Our bulb wish list for this area included Crocus boryi with its white stigmas, and we were not disappointed.
We also found the very first poppy anemone (Anemone coronaria) of the season. Not the fields of red and purple poppies we’d seen in Liberto’s early spring photos, but still……
Fifteen minutes later we were walking atop limestone on the beach at St. Nicholas. On it grew yellow-flowered rock samphire (Crithmum maritimum), which Liberto said is preserved in Greece as a pickle called “kritamo”.
A walk to a little vacant lot brought us some good specimens of the tiny autumn daffodil Narcissus obsoletus (syn. N. serotinus), left. And we saw the beginning growth of the spectacular bulb Drimia numidica (Urginia maritima) whose seedhead I’d photographed with a snail aboard in Areopoli.
Our hotel was in Kardamyli, with balconies open to the sound of waves crashing on the beach below. The Kalamitsi Hotel might have been the place where most of us would have chosen to stay for a week of sheer relaxation and reading (no botanizing). My little video gives you a flavour of this part of the Peloponnese with its rugged mountains.
Our final day of botanizing took us over the Taygetos Mountain range. I’m not sure I’ve rhapsodized enough about the mountain scenery in Greece. But this view of the northern gorges en route to Kalamata gives you a sense of the majesty of these peaks.
And, of course, there was flora. Our goal here was the autumn-flowering snowdrop (Galanthus reginae-olgae), and we were not disappointed – finding it clinging to small shelves of vegetation on damp cliff faces alongside the road, below. There were also tall plane trees (Platanus orientalis) growing up from the valley floor and goats climbing the rocky mountainsides. And the most cool purple striations in parts of the rock.
Soon we were sitting at lunch in Kalamata saying our final thank-yous to Liberto. He would be taking a group of Californians to Chile a few days later followed by botanizing in the Argentine Andes and a visit to Rio de Janiero. So the botanical part of our time in Greece was coming to an end.
But we had one more beautiful stop as the sun set near Athens – a rocky hillside spangled with golden Sternbergia lutea.
Most of us chose to add four days to the trip in order to visit some of Greece’s most famous antiquity sites with Archaeology Professor Stavros Oikonomidis of Arcadia University. And, of course, there was always something notable from the world of flora… like the iconic bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) at the Greek agora in Athens…..
…. and the storied olive tree near the Eractheion atop the Acropolis.
These beautiful cypresses (Cupressus sempervirens) were growing at the monastery at Kaisariani on Mount Hymettus.
The view from Mycenae over the 3500-year-old ruins down onto the olive groves (and the fragrance as the olives were being harvested) was unforgettable. Ephedra distachya was bearing its red fruit, and I adored the tiny, perfect rock garden I found there with Cyclamen graecum emerging from a crevice in the outcrop.
And finally, Delphi. This is the place every visitor to Greece should see: a living. breathing link to a past culture devoted to the gods of mythology – Apollo and Athena – and home to the sanctuary of the Oracle of Delphi and the high priestess Pythia (a series of priestesses through the centuries). You can read more about Delphi online, but as we walked up the sacred way past the temples and monuments and limestone walls inscribed with the names of the rich and powerful who visited more than two millennia ago, I caught a little glimpse of purple. These days, you can call on an oracle quite quickly (provided you pay your roaming fees) without any need for a pythia getting involved. The answer came back before I’d walked back down the path: “!! Campanula topaliana subsp. delphica. They flower in spring. ” Somehow, on my very last day touring Greece, to find an endemic blooming out of season and so specific to this place of mythology…
…. especially since I have an entire dining room of botanical prints solely of campanulas from Flora Danica to Sowerby’s to Mrs. Loudon, etc…… it just seemed the perfect finale.
Thus ended our tour of Greece and its autumn flora and antiquities. We had checked off a good percentage of the plant list we were given at the start of the trip. But we saw and experienced so much more. Efharisto, Liberto. (That would make a great puzzle word…) Many thanks for showing us your beautiful country.
*******
And finally, a little epilogue. Man does not live by flora alone, of course. There is also music – a word that, after all, originates with the Greek word “mousikē” for “art of the muses”. Before I left for Greece, Liberto invited me to come out with him and his friends Maria and Natalia in Athens to see a favourite band from Crete. It was such a fun evening and the band was still playing when I headed back to the hotel at 3 am, mindful of my 6 am alarm(!) I was very moved by the music of Giorgis and Nikos Stratakis — Γιώργος & Νίκος Στρατάκης — and their band (music which seemed to share some Celtic rhythms with my own ancestry, especially the tsampouna or bagpipes). But I simply cannot imagine any North American band playing their own version of several verses of a 17th century romantic poem (Erotokritos from Cretefrom 1 to 6:28 min) and everyone in the audience knowing the chorus and singing it with great passion. That is most definitely the Greek spirit… or, perhaps, that elusive Greek quality ‘filotimo‘. Here is a little taste, courtesy of my video, of An Autumn Night in Athens.
Happiest of holidays to all my friends out there. Kαλές διακοπές! I’ll be back in the new year with more gardens.
As the crow (or Air New Zealand) flies, it’s approximately 1024 kilometres (636 miles) from Auckland on the North Island to Queenstown on the South Island, most of it over the Tasman Sea. That was our route on our 7th touring day with the American Horticultural Society’s Gardens, Wine & Wilderness Tour in January 2018.
Below on Google’s satellite view is the approximate route that AZ 615 takes inland from the Tasman Sea (which also separates Australia and New Zealand), bearing southeast over the Southern Alps towards Queenstown.
Gate to gate, the flight takes about 1 hour and 50 minutes (80 minutes or so of flying time) and the last 15 minutes of flying over the lake, through the valley in which Queenstown sits and up its Frankton Arm to the airport make it among the most beautiful air approaches on the planet. In fact in 2015 respondents named Queenstown as the “most scenic airport approach” in a survey of that category.
So….. given that we had perfect weather on the flight, that I had the almost perfect seat overlooking the left engine cowling, and that I was enjoying trying out my new Samsung S8 phone, indulge me for a few photos while we approach Queenstown together. (If you make it to the end, there’s a little….’surprise’.) The route took us over the Southern Alps, the South Island’s long backbone, which stretches for 500 kilometres from Fiordland in the southwest to Nelson Lake National Park in the northeast. Here we are looking north toward Mount Aspiring National Park. North of the park and not visible in the photo is mighty Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak at 3724 metres (12,218 ft), where we would be in a few days.
Within seconds, below, the northernmost arm of the dogleg-shaped (Z-shaped) Lake Wakatipu was visible, with Pig Island a notable landmark. This beautiful finger lake is 80 kilometres (50 miles) long with a maximum depth of 380 metres (1280 feet). Though the mountains look barren here, that greenish-yellow in the scree and fellfields on the slopes features snow tussock meadows with myriad high alpine species.
In the photo below we are looking straight up Lake Wakatipu towards the town of Glenorchy at its head. The lake was carved out by glaciers more than 15,000 years ago, between mountains uplifted over millions of years by earthquakes along the Alpine Fault. (New Zealand is part of the seismically-active Ring of Fire in the Pacific Basin, as we know from recent devastating earthquakes in Christchurch and elsewhere). Here on the west side of the South Island, the mountains are made of greywacke, a sandstone-mudstone mix that rose tectonically with the mountains from sediment in a deep ocean trench on the boundary of the Gondwana supercontinent between 100-300 million years ago. (Before it broke off and floated away, New Zealand was on the edge of Gondwana, which also included South America, Africa, Australia, India, and Antarctic.) Because greywacke fractures and falls apart easily, mountain climbers in the Southern Alps nicknamed it ‘Weetbix’. On the east side of the South Island, the bedrock is mostly metamorphic schist. For a more comprehensive exploration of New Zealand geology, have a look at this excellent website.
Now we’re heading straight along the middle arm of the Z-shaped lake towards Queenstown.
A little fun fact about Lake Wakatipu. Its dogleg shape causes it to produce a tide-like phenomenon called a seiche, or standing wave, derived from a Swiss-French word that means “swaying back and forth”. The lake’s surface rises and falls roughly 10 cm (4 inches) on a 25-minute cycle, best observed apparently at Bob’s Cove (below) on the way into Queenstown. In Māori legend, the rhythmic surging was caused by the monster Matau dozing away at the bottom of the lake.
A few seconds later, we come to the fun part: Queenstown. Though it’s New Zealand’s winter sports centre with lots of mountain areas to ski,there is something for everyone in this alpine town 12 months a year. Here I’ve labelled a few of the things we did over the next few days. Yes, we visited the Queenstown Garden and then travelled up the gondola in order to botanize on the flank of Ben Lomond from which we saw those ‘ghost pines’ in the far left!
And this, a second or so later….Yes, my husband Doug played golf at the Queenstown Golf Course, below (thank goodness for extra-curricular activities for non-gardening spouses!) Now we’re flying down the Frankton Arm of Lake Wakatipu towards the airport suburb of, yes, Frankton.
You must be thinking we’re going to land any moment now, right? Well, that’s what we thought as we roared towards the runway………
…. but NO! Captain didn’t like those tricky Queenstown winds. So up we went for a fly-around. Of course, no one would rather ‘take a chance’ on a landing, so thank you Captain AZ615 for keeping things safe. Now we see the Lower Shotover River behind the airport as we ascend again. Fun!
I’m not quite sure where we went…. Remarkables? (There are so many mountains around Queenstown). Anyway, we rounded a craggy, brown peak……
….. and flew over Lake Hayes, below. (At this point, I should give a nod to Google Earth, which helped me identify many of the Queenstown area landmarks.)
Finally, with that first small adventure under our belt, we landed at the airport in Queenstown – adventure capital of New Zealand!
Wine-Tasting Adventure!
Alan, our lovely bus driver from the North Island was at the airport to meet us and off we drove along the Kawauru River towards Cromwell. This narrow gorge of the river is called Roaring Meg; it contains a dam and two small power stations that form the Roaring Meg Power Scheme, built in 1934. Hydro-electric power provides almost 60% of New Zealand’s electricity.
I couldn’t resist this bus window view of the local greywacke rock with its “Weetbix” composition.
Before long we arrived at Goldfields where we were scheduled to have a wine tasting and lunch. But the place is more than that; it offers tourists a chance to pan for gold like the prospectors who arrived by the thousands in the 1860s for the Central Otago Gold Rush.
Or you could pay to sit in a jet boat and roar up the Kawauru Gorge. (No thanks…)
Instead we elected to head to our reserved table at Wild Earth Wines…….
…. to enjoy a wine tasting……
….. and have a lunch that reminded us all that New Zealand is home to vibrant sheep and cattle farming industries as well as a rich fishery!
After lunch, we had a date with one of New Zealand’s iconic adventure tourism spots. Along the route, we passed a small vineyard and learned that this is the most southerly of New Zealand’s wine-growing regions.
NOT Bungy-Jumping Adventure!
Soon we arrived at the Kawarau Bridge Bungy Centre, which is the original site for New Zealand bungy-jumping. It was here in 1989 that Kiwi pals A.J. Hackett and Henry Van Asch first launched their plans for a commercial bungy-jumping enterprise mimicking the “land jumpers” of Vanautu. Check out this video at 2:35 of their big p.r. stunt in Paris, bungy-jumping from the Eiffel Tower, followed by a quick arrest. One of the serious medical risks of doing this is retinal detachment – and since I suffered one of those without even jumping off my kitchen table a few decades back, I restricted myself to photographing the lovely young woman below, who would have paid $205 ($175 NZ student) for the privilege of doing this……
…… and videotaping a man doing a water dunk as he enjoyed his bungy-jump, with a little valley wind in the background. (My 4- and 2-year old grandkids LOVE this video.!)
We watched as river rafts waited for the jumpers to clear the platform. A few in our group chose to do some rafting the next day – but we were planning to look for plants!
Janet Blair Garden
Then we made our way towards Queenstown via the lovely garden of Janet Blair.
Our American Horticultural Society guide Richard Lyon of Garden Adventures, Ltd. enjoyed his chat with our hostess, Janet. Richard, a Pennsylvania-based landscape architect has friendships with a long roster of creative gardeners who generously open their gardens to him on his annual winter tours to his home country.
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Look at this heart-shaped hedge window…..
….. and this beautiful arch into a garden room.
New Zealand experienced record heat in our first week of touring, echoing the dry summer they had before our arrival. This shady dell offered welcome relief.
Pretty combinations abounded in Janet’s garden, like this lavatera with lavender that…..
….. mirrors the hues of the Remarkables mountain range in the background, below. It was now time to head to our hotel in Queenstown for the night.
Queenstown Public Garden Advenure!
A free day in Queenstown! Along with a few plant geeks in the group, I visited the Queenstown Garden where our AHS host Panayoti Kelaidis, outreach director at Denver Botanic Gardens…..
…..toured us through the collections, which came from all over the world.
Apart from native New Zealand plants like lacebark ( Hoheria populnea)……
….. and wire netting bush (Corokia cotoneaster)….
……. I found some beautiful Romneya coulteri from California being visited by honey bees…..
….. and giant California redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum) with massive trunks….
…..and towering Douglas firs (Pseudotsuga menziesii). Seeing them here, clearly thriving after many decades, it would be shocking later that day to see the way they’ve invaded the mountains and valleys surrounding Queenstown – including those in the background of the photo – where the flanks are dark green with these Pacific Northwest natives.
Botanizing on Ben Lomond Adventure!
Soon after lunch, a few of us convened at the hotel and shared a cab to the Skyline Gondola Station at the base of Ben Lomond or Te-taumata-oHakitekura. It was a popular place with mountain-bikers and everyday folks like us.
Going up, the view of Queenstown Bay and Lake Wakatipu was spectacular. You can see right here the ‘wilding pines’ – a generic name for many non-native trees like these Douglas firs that were planted by European colonists in the late 1800s as a beautification project. Subsequent plantings took place as Arbor Day activities.
After getting off at the top where the view is even more stunning…..
….. we began our ‘tramp’ (as the Kiwis call a hike) by walking up through a dark Douglas fir forest. Notice that there are no understory plants here. Nada.
Soon we were on a path curving gently up through the Ben Lomond Scenic Reserve. We would be stopping well short of the upper saddle and summit (1748 m – 5735 ft), but it was still a good walk. And the botanizing was great!
I saw my very first mountain beech (Fuscospora cliffortioides).
The view over the subalpine shrubland was stunning…..
…..if you discounted the sprayed ghost forest of Douglas firs across the valley and the young trees popping up in the tussock grasses.
They are taking ‘control’ of these invasive conifers very seriously, as evidence by the sign here. And coming down on the path as we were ascending was one of the wilding eradication volunteers, clippers stuffed in his backpack.
But the plants! We saw turf mat daisy (Raoulia subsericea)…
….. and turpentine bush (Dracophyllum uniflorum), so called because of its eagerness to burn…..
….. and mountain cottonwood (Ozothamnus vauvilliersii)…..
….. and a very cool lycopod, Lycopodium fastigiatum.
That’s snow totara (Podocarpus nivalis) with the red berries, below. Not sure about the prostrate plant.
Panayoti had his reference book of New Zealand alpines with him, but he is a natural font of botanical knowledge and pointed out the tiniest plants to us as we trekked up the path. On the way we were passed by lots of young hikers heading up to the summit or coming down. From here, it was another 1-1/2 hours to the top. Ah to be young again, with fresh knees……
We had decided that the beech forest would be our turnaround point, and we finally got there. What a day it had been. Sitting in the shade under the beech trees…..
…… we realized we were tired, hot and thirsty. Time to start the hike down the mountain and back to the hotel — with a timely stop at a Queenstown pub en route. No gin-and-tonic ever tasted quite as delicious as the one I polished off with my fellow ‘trampers’.
