A Visit to Three Greek Gardens
The hot and dry Mediterranean climate of Greece can make it challenging to maintain a healthy garden. Even more difficult are intensifying heat waves that last longer and occur more frequently every summer and mild winters that offer little rainfall. During the past several months, I have had the opportunity to visit several flourishing gardens. These successful gardens demonstrate the level of dedication and passion it takes to have a thriving garden in Greece.
Sparoza in athens
Sparoza is an experimental garden located on a hillside in Paianía in the eastern suburbs of Athens. The garden is the official headquarters of the Mediterranean Garden Society and has been the property of the Goulandris Natural History Museum since the 1980s when it was bequeathed to the museum by its founder Mary Jaqueline “Jacky” Tyrwhitt (1905-1983). After Jacky’s notable accomplishment of creating and managing a successful garden for twenty years, Sally Razelou (1931-2021) managed the garden for an impressive thirty years. Today, the head gardener is Lucie Willan, a highly knowledgeable and professional horticulturist from the UK.
I visited the garden in April during the Mediterranean Garden Society’s 30th anniversary celebration. The garden is designed as a drought-tolerant garden with a variety of native and non-native species, many of which were acquired during the plant-inspired travels of Jacky and Sally. During my visit, I smelled the fragrant lavender (Lavandula dentata) and rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus) in the herb bed and was delighted to see the pomegranate tree (Punica granatum) in bloom with its vibrant red flowers. The garden is organized into sections, which include the Dry Bed, the Desert, Succulent Terraces, the Sally Gardens (Phrygana), the Hillside, and other distinct areas. I also admired the water lilies (Nymphaea sp.) floating in the pool, which serves as a type of wetland to collect rainwater and run-off from the hill and to provide water to animals and insects. Strategically, the plants in the garden are not watered as a way to strengthen their ability to survive in the hot and dry conditions of the Mediterranean climate.
Sparoza is a work of gardening wisdom and lessons. Earlier in the year I had read Jacky’s book, Making a Garden on a Greek Hillside, which was published posthumously in 1998 with subsequent editions. Her book reads like a diary describing the garden activities and challenges for each month of the year, as well as the local traditions of Greek country life. Sparoza holds more than fifty years of memories inspired by the flora of Greece and it exemplifies the work of extraordinary women who were driven to create and maintain a sustainable garden on a characteristically difficult and rocky parcel of land.
The Evia Island Garden Club
As part of a Mediterranean Garden Society excursion this past June, I participated on a tour of the Evia Island Garden Club located on the grounds of Villa Kasteli in the southern tip of Evia island. Villa Kasteli is located near Castello Rosso (Red Castle), built by the Byzantines in the 11th century in the foothills of Mt Ochi. (I write about the significance of Mt. Ochi in The Greek Herbalist’s Guide to the Mountain.) The garden was awash with vibrant colors, textures, and fragrances across well-designed layouts on a terraced slope. The view from the garden provides a scenic overlook of the town of Karystos and its horseshoe bay where many popular beaches are located.
Lilian Lorenz, owner and caretaker extraordinaire, led us through each part of the garden and explained her expert techniques for maintenance, water management, and soil quality. Over the past five years since the garden was created, she has hosted a variety of garden-inspired workshops and retreats. The beauty and bounty of her garden is a testament to her dedication and unceasing efforts to transform the Greek landscape into a sanctuary for community and celebration.
A garden on Syros
In July, I visited Janet Harley, head of the Attica branch of the Mediterranean Garden Society, at her home on Syros island. Janet’s garden provides a relief of various tones of green among the brown and shrubby landscape. She has created a low maintenance, sustainable water-wise garden primarily with low-growing plants. Janet is originally from New Zealand and has made Greece her home for the past 40 years. Her garden on Syros demonstrates the possibilities for creating a landscape with Greek flora that can thrive with little maintenance in hot and dry conditions.
Syros is located in the Cyclades, a group of about 30 islands in the Aegean Sea, and is the administrative capital of the region. The island is hilly with an irregular shape and its landscape is characterized by bushes and phrygana flora. During my visit, I could hear the neighbors with their weedwhacker cutting down tall grasses that could potentially be a fire hazard. The risks of wildfire have become increasingly common throughout Greece and their heightened threat has prompted government ordinances to maintain private property by cutting back or completely removing certain native plants that are considered high-risk. Ironically, the removal of these native plants will inevitably change the natural landscape in an effort to save it.
The future of gardening in Greece
The importance of having these types of sustainable gardens can not be understated. As the winters in Greece become more mild and the summers even hotter, the increasing need to know how to maintain a garden in these conditions becomes more evident. Greek flora are a defining feature of Greek history and culture and are critical for landscape maintenance, as sources of food, and as medicine. Since antiquity, they have been written about for their central role in religious traditions, family recipes, and herbal remedies. By creating sustainable Mediterranean gardens, the traditions and stories about them can also be preserved.
It was a delight to visit these gardens in Athens and on the islands of Evia and Syros, and learn about the strategies and unceasing efforts required to maintain them. While the Greek landscape continues to change because of a warming climate and the destruction caused by wildfires, these gardens offer a burst of color and hope for the future.
