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The
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The MGS Garden at Sparoza |
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2010 2009 2008 |
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MARCH 2010 |
As the warm wet winter turned into a warm dry early spring, the garden at Sparoza was stunningly beautiful. Niggling worries about the lack of spring rain were put to one side because heavy downpours would for once be unwelcome. Sally, Peter and the volunteers worked tidying and tweaking to get everything in the garden ready for the great event – the making of a full-length video of Sally in the Sparoza garden. It had been a dream of many of us that a record of Sally's garden should be preserved on film and suddenly all the necessary elements were in place: the cost was covered by a generous grant and a member/film-maker was ready and willing to do the job. Terry Moyemont, who has been a friend of Sally and visitor to Sparoza for many years, was a professional film-maker before turning into a nurseryman and the Head of the Pacific North West Branch. For ten days he combined his two loves, basking in the pleasure of filming the garden in all the shades of light from dawn to dusk and shadowing Sally as she went about her tasks. At the same time he took a huge number of still photographs, some of which are reproduced below. We call it 'the garden at Sparoza' or 'the MGS garden' or even sometimes 'Jacky Tyrwhitt's garden' but let there be no mistake that this is Sally's garden. Miss Tyrwhitt founded it and the MGS sponsors it but in effect the garden as it is now is a pure expression of Sally's love, inspiration and skill. In the terraces she mostly has single specimens, each one positioned with knowledge and care, and described like a friend. "The original plant of this was given me years ago by Heidi Gildemeister" she tells you of an Eriocephalus africanus. "The mandrakes in Derek's garden came from the M…s' on Syros." Yet the plants are ruthlessly dug up and moved on if they prove too brutish or fail to thrive. Meanwhile the hillside becomes richer with the introduction of plants which have proved their drought-worthiness yet still the natural feeling of the phrygana is maintained. We wait with impatience to see how Terry has captured Sally's garden on film. And already Sally is planning for the autumn when the new garden assistant will arrive: what will move, what will stay and what will be sent "up the hillside". Terry has photographs from his previous visits but now they are historical records – visions of a garden which was beautiful but different. The MGS would like to express its sincere thanks to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation whose grant made the filming of Sally's garden a reality. The film will be available to members in October 2010.
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FEBRUARY / MARCH 2010 |
The Mediterranean Garden at Sparoza: a perfect mixture of Greek native and introduced mediterranean-climate plants in a natural setting. Photographs by Davina Michaelides.
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FEBRUARY 2010 |
This winter, while our members in northern Europe and even in the south of Spain and France suffered from prolonged snow and cold, here in Attica we were enjoying a wonderfully mild wet season. The lightest of frosts when a little snow fell on the surrounding mountains has been the worst so far. February came in with a bit of a cold snap but soon the temperature was spring-like again, encouraging the wild flowers into a frenzy of blooming. The soil was damp to a good depth, as proved by how easy it was to pull up the weeds. But as the month progressed without any more rain we feared that an early drought might spoil the spring pleasures. At Sparoza pruning was one of the major jobs; shrubs like artemisia, previously dead-headed, were cut back into shape and the roses were pruned, although not the lovely Icebergs. Sally has found that her Icebergs do not respond well to pruning and get weaker rather than strong if pruned hard. Some of the olives on the estate hadn’t been touched for ages, so throughout the first two months of the year Peter Dinning set to with the saw to bring them to order and pile up logs for the fire. Unfortunately the good weather encouraged the Oxalis pes-caprae to spread as never before and all the garden help was engaged at one time or another in digging it up. With the soil so friable it was sometimes possible to get the plants out whole with bulbs and bulbils still attached to the end of the stem – but how frustrating when they then dropped off and disappeared back into the soil to reproduce next year. Although the oxalis grows most luxuriantly in the improved soil of the beds, it is also making its way into the wild. Asphodelus aestivus makes a marvellous show but it has become too rampant at Sparoza. As mentioned before, Sally has turned this into an advantage by letting the asphodels create planting pockets for her. Digging a hole in the rocky hillside is an arm-jarring job but digging up an asphodel is relatively easy and the holes left are just ready to be filled by something else - Narcissus papyraceus this time. One of the plants that attract compliments from visitors to the garden is a dark blue-flowered teucrium – Teucrium fruticans 'Azureum'. Planted in an irrigated terrace, this plant reproduces by suckering and Sally is able to use the young suckers to grow on in the nursery for plant exchanges. Out in the phrygana the same plant prospers without any summer water but does not sucker at all, perhaps to conserve its energy. Both Cyclamen graecum and C. persicum have self-seeded in the garden this year. Sally has grown cyclamen from seed on many occasions but it was a pleasure to see these strong little plants being potted up in the nursery; of course there is a certain satisfaction in getting something for nothing but more basically it is seeing nature melding with the artificialness of a garden.
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NOVEMBER 2009 |
In November and December the queen of trees at Sparoza is the Rhus lancea and this year the blossom was the best ever - the whole tree came alive with the dropping sprays of yellow '‘flowers'. As we stood admiring the picture, it struck me that the terraces below the house are now in the shade of a variety of mature trees. Some of them are well known to friends of the garden like the row of cypresses planted by Jacky Tyrwhitt as a windbreak at the north end of the terraces, and the pomegranate trees whose fruits - so gaily-coloured – have been photographed by many visitors. The fruit of the bitter orange trees in the same terrace is mentioned for its good marmalade qualities by Jacky Tyrwhitt in her book. Then there are the dancing olives. These are two trees which were cut back to the ground before Sally Razelou’s time and grew back again with multiple trunks. The patterns of the trunks, kept clean of branches for the first 1.5 metres, give the feeling of movement. The heart of one has been planted with a Cyclamen persicum shown in the Diary in February. The 'Golden Rain Tree' has never been identified to Sally’s satisfaction – Sophora japonica is the best guess.
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SEPTEMBER 2009 |
The beginning of September at Sparoza is all expectation as Sally awaits the first rains and the next Garden Assistant. They arrive almost synchronously and the new gardening year takes off. Peter Dinning comes to Sparoza having spent all his working life in horticulture in the UK. I asked him to give me his impressions after a month in what he described as his new career. His first comment was on how much he was enjoying the climate and the relaxed atmosphere and why the two were connected. He explained how in the UK the weather was so variable that if a task needed to be done in particular conditions then there was great pressure to get it completed before the conditions changed. In the mild month of September at Sparoza though, jobs had simply continued from day to day without stress. He had learnt from his previous employment in large elegant gardens to be tidy and careful with his tools but had been frustrated by the requirement to have every growing part of the garden always in perfect order. He preferred the more natural approach at Sparoza where even in the beds wild flowers and random seedlings are often welcomed and plants are frequently left to grow as they wish. There were many plants in the garden and on the hillside which were quite new to Peter and which he was looking forward to studying, but even the plants he was familiar with were growing differently and needed different treatment. In general he realized that he had much to learn but hoped soon enough to be able to contribute suggestions to the garden’s development; he had already understood that Sally was open and receptive to his ideas, which was quite a change for him from working under strict landscape designers. The month ends and summer has returned without any further rain having fallen on Attica although elsewhere the grapes are rotting on the vines because of the constant downpours. Will October see the rain clouds coming our way?
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AUGUST 2009 |
As August comes to an end and we await the first autumn rains, Sally Razelou tells me that she has maintained the garden (and house) since the last rains at the beginning of May with a remarkably low 78 cubic metres of water. She will describe her irrigation regime for 2009 in a future issue of The Mediterranean Garden, while my mind now turns to what I know about the changes in the watering system in the garden. When the hillside terraces where first constructed, cement irrigation channels were fashioned along the edge of each one as an adaptation of the traditional earth channels used for centuries by farmers in their vegetable plots. Such a channel is visible in the photo below. Jacky Tyrwhitt watered by means of these channels when the terraces were first planted, but after a few seasons it became clear that they were too inflexible and wasteful of water so hand-watering had to take over. Coming forward to 2000, the MGS had taken over the garden more formally and was financing a garden assistant and the purchase of many new plants. Hand-watering became too time-consuming so a drip irrigation system was installed throughout the terraces, in some of the front beds and up the hillside. Apart from on the hillside, the system used double-walled perforated piping rather than individual drippers and was controlled automatically by a 4-programme, 12-circuit timer. Unfortunately the system relied on the water pressure created by having the water cistern at the top of the hill so the watering pipes on the hill which were supposed to irrigate the newly planted trees never delivered sufficient water. In addition, within a few years the hard water from the well started to fur up many of the perforations in the pipes and sections of the beds were left dry. By then, however, the whole philosophy of mediterranean gardening was changing and we were at last accepting the fact that daily and even weekly watering had to be reserved for pots and vegetables in the former case and for a small proportion of the plants in our gardens in the latter. Heidi Gildemeister’s waterwise approach was leading the way. Sally therefore declined offers to renew the system, preferring to make do with a combination of systems, part old, part new, with sprays and drippers; eventually the entire garden was watered by hand as described in July 2008, while the volume of irrigation water used was reduced. By 2008 it was down to 73 cubic metres. Now was the time to strike a balance between water consumption and plant variety. The number of deaths occurring showed clearly that many mediterranean plants could not survive without help in the harsh conditions of Sparoza, so in 2009 Sally returned to an irrigation system more finely tuned this time to the plants and controlled by her rather than by an automatic timer so that each circuit could be given the water needed. Now at the end of August the plants do not have the lush appearance achieved by abundant watering, they are hardened and quiet but surviving to come awake again in the October “spring”.
Photographs by Davina Michaelides |
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MAY 2009 |
In most of Greece May made little pretence of being part of spring this year. The earlier cool, wet weather had provided us with an abundance of wildflowers for our May Day wreaths but almost immediately the temperature rose into the 30s and summer had arrived. Sally recorded a few drops of rain at Sparoza on 6th May but from then on the phrygana quickly turned from green to brown and by the second half of the month it was time for mowing. Many people regret the passing of the scythe — in skilled hands the grass could be cut quite quickly with a graceful swish. Now anyone with strength enough can get out the motor strimmer and amidst much noise and dust another unpleasant job is done. Young Antoine Quelen, on placement from the landscape architecture college at Blois (ENSNP), was “volunteered” for the task this time. The volunteers themselves took on the weeding of the gravel path which runs through the triangular section of phrygana below the house, so that by the end of the month the whole area had taken on its tidy summer appearance.
Photographs by Davina Michaelides |
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APRIL 2009 |
Many years ago when we were planning an MGS exhibition in Greece, the President, Katherine Greenberg, suggested the title Out of the Wild and Into the Garden. Those plans never bore fruit, but in fact there is an exhibition that could go by that name every April at the MGS garden at Sparoza. The hillside phrygana is the ultimate wild garden − flowering fit to burst; green shoots covering every shrub; a feast for the eyes, nose and emotions. Some of the spring treasures in close-up:
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JANUARY 2009 |
A good beginning to the gardening year as the rains continued and the weather stayed cold but above freezing. Although in terms of millimetres (75.5) the amount of rain has not been as much as in some previous years, the kind of weather has been ideal − the rainfall has been steady and regular with few storms heavy enough to cause the water to run off unabsorbed. Even on dry days the skies have been cloudy and the atmosphere so heavy that transpiration has been limited. Not great for the rheumatism but the ground has stayed soft and damp − comforting for the plants which were suffering by the end of the long summer drought.
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DECEMBER 2008 |
Where are the anemones?
Photos by Davina Michaelides
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SEPTEMBER 2008 |
September came in this year as it should, with days of soft, penetrating rain. Sally excitedly recorded the millimeters on her chart as the garden broke into its ‘second spring’. Imperceptibly the plants started to look more alive and then colour reasserted itself as blooms reappeared –Sternbergia lutea, Zephyranthus, Amaryllis belladona, Tulbaghia violacea and Cyclamen graeca among the bulbs, and roses, bougainvillea, Ceratostigma plumbaginoides, Pavonia hastata and Liriope muscari among the herbaceous plants. Only those plants whose survival is in the balance will need a little longer to show signs of life. Suddenly in a terrace bed we can seethe exotic Haemanthus coccineus – deep scarlet flowers coming and going before the huge rounded leaves emerge. As the month proceeds seedlings of Cerinthe retorta and Delphinium staphisagria start to appear en masse, to be thinned and left only where they can grow unfettered. Unfortunately an unwelcome guest also returns. In the lists of harmful invasive plants (some of which are mentioned in TMG 54), South African Oxalis pes-caprae does not rank very high since farmers are not much bothered by it, but it is one of our greatest garden pests. Forty years ago Jacky Tyrwhitt was relaxed about letting it spread in her garden at Sparoza because she enjoyed the yellow flowers in spring and Sally has been battling against it ever since. The effects can be unexpected. In an attempt not to recycle it through the garden, the pulled oxalis along with other weedings from affected beds is gathered for the rubbish rather than the compost heap. This means that the compost mix is short of soft waste matter and the natural breakdown of the hard wood prunings etc is retarded. Without a male garden assistant (or indeed any garden assistant) this year to introduce a little ‘activator’ into the compost heap (see Compost-making at Sparoza TMG 39), piles of unrotted waste accumulate. “Perhaps the neighbours would give us their grass mowings” was the heretical suggestion of one of the volunteers. For yes indeed, the Sparoza hill is now dotted with villas sporting gardens which grow in defiance of the natural setting – the olives, orchids and stones having been replaced by leylandii cypress, lawns and pools.
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JULY 2008 |
Dead or Alive Having ditched the inefficient automatic watering system which we had been planning to renovate this year, Sally is experimenting with ‘emergency room’ watering all done by hose and hand. Plants regarded as totally drought-tolerant are nevertheless watched for signs of over-stress. Some rhamnus, spiraea and even lentisks and a small Arbutus unedo, after two statistically dry winters, have shown signs of succumbing to stress and have been given emergency water rations to save them. Meanwhile less drought-tolerant plants, mostly in the terraces, are given deep watering (that is, as far as you can call it deep when the underlying rock is so close to the surface) every so often. But throughout the garden there is a feeling of stillness - no lush growth, no fresh green weeds nor any abundance of flowers. In fact at this time of year bright colour is mostly confined to the pot plants in the true Greek manner. Alas, Sally no longer uses feta tins but I somehow feel we should find some for her to give her entrance a true national flavour.
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MAY 2008 |
April and May are the months when Sparoza is home to students on placement from the French Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage of Blois. Due to the relative isolation of Sparoza for those without personal transport, Sally Razelou generously offers places to two students so that they have company. Photos of 2007 by Marie Gallienne and Eloyse Descurninges
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APRIL 2008 |
Styrax officinalisA large deciduous shrub native to Italy, Greece, Turkey and California with sweet-scented white flowers which open in late spring. This makes an attractive garden plant though I have never seen it in a nursery. If properly grown it needs no summer irrigation. Despite its size it should be planted where the light fragrance will drift across a path rather that at the distant back of a bed. In the MGS garden it grows next to the lower road. Botanically, it is interesting. The bark gives a resin which has been used for medicinal purposes. Arthur Gibson notes: " Uses of natural products from bark of Styrax date back at least to the Sumerians, who incorporated the terpenoid resin storax into a variety of medicinal preparations, such as liniments and ointments, applied to sores, aches, and infections. Some accounts say that the inner bark was crushed, and then hot water was used to extracted the terpenoids, whereas others mention boiling the bark and skimming the insoluble resin scum before pressing the inner bark for more extract. From that storax is refined into an opaque liquid having the viscosity of honey and the fragrance of balsam." This was known in ancient Greece where Theophrastus gave the plant the name Styrax which has remained unaltered ever since. In the 1750s, Linnaeus described Styrax officinalis known to him from the wild in Southern Europe. It turned out to be also a native shrub of Southern California, Styrax officinalis L. var. redivivus (Torrey). Arthur Gibson again: "Three decades ago there was extensive discussion about intercontinental disjunctions. Certain genera and a handful of species have very large discontinuities in their range, some having gaps of ten to twenty thousand kilometers. Styrax officinalis is one of those, being at approximately the same latitude but nine time zones away: California to Italy. This has been termed by Dr. Thorne (in 1972) as the Mediterranean-American disjunction. How and when the populations of this species became so separated is still a matter of speculation, because there are other plants of the Mediterranean region that have very closely related species in California. Other species of Styrax also occur in North America; for example, there are four native species in the flora of Texas, and the many of species in the genus are native to eastern Asia. The only reasonable conclusion is that this genus was once widely distributed across the Northern Hemisphere and became restricted to certain smaller zone." Fleur Pavlidis 1 ARTHUR C. GIBSON, MEMBG Director, Newsletter Spring 2002Volume 5(2), Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden UCLA
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FEBRUARY 2008 |
After several weeks of mostly bleak winter weather, the meteorological office forecast snow for the south of Greece – snow which would settle.
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JANUARY 2008 |
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