Planting my escape

The Easter holiday arrived with some disagreement and a little resentment on my part.  Faced with 3 weeks of daily sprogging and endless downpours I was keen to book a family trip, and I’ve been longing to return to Greece at Easter for years.  It was selfishly motivated to be sure.  I have incredibly vivid and formative childhood memories of spring wildflowers on mainland Greece and happen to be in the middle of planting up two enormous, dry banks with Greek hillsides as my inspiration.  So yes, I would have dragged the kids off to do some botanising at every opportunity, but I’m sure they would have loved it.

Toby, thinking practically, pointed out that flying 3 ½ hours with 2 sprogs and a baby for a few days would be a lot of effort; that it was a bit last minute; that Iris insists on napping in cot twice a day so we would be wedded to our rooms.  Eventually I agreed that we should leave it for another year.  And so, the Easter holiday arrived, an unstructured morass of rainy, muddy days.

The plus side of staying put was that, in the first few days while my parents in law were visiting, I had time to start work on my own miniature Mediterranean hillside.  Step one was laying out the 80 or so plants I had assembled.  And so, rather than roaming amidst sun drenched banks of euphorbia, I stood in drizzle, clutching a soggy piece of tracing paper and pacing out the small, sad looking green tufts of my own potted Euphorbia wulfenii.  The first bank is 13m by 8 with a fairly complex planting plan, so I trudged around arranging the blues of lavender, spreading rosemary and ceanothus, nepeta, perovskia and 60 sky blue iris, interwoven with the airy yellow wands of Cytisis praecox, Baptisia, Phlomis fruticosa and Sisyrinchium.  After several hours in the mud, the plants were laid out, but the rain had begun to set in, so I downed tools for the day and headed inside where the sprogs were merrily bouncing off the walls.

That night Iris woke crying at 2am and, as I fed her, I listened to the sound of 40mph winds ripping around the house.  In my stupor I didn’t register the full implications of this, but when I came out, spade in hand, the following morning, all 80 pots had blown off their bank and into our drive.  I began again, this time working on small sections and then planting to secure them.

Yellow flowered broom, Cytisus praecox ‘All Gold’

As I worked, the names of the plants transported me to the Mediterranean: Verbascum olympicum, Genista aetnensis and Helleborus corsicus.  In went the ferny leaves of Ferula communis which grow in their thousands on Greek mountainsides, and the stem of which was used by Prometheus as a vessel for that first spark of fire he gifted to mankind.  I planted banks of the wild Iris pallida, sacred to the goddess of rainbows, and clumps of sulphur yellow Helichrysum from which Apollo wove his crown.

There was a painful irony to planting these drought tolerant beauties in the rain, but in the end, it was probably no bad thing.  This part of the garden is designed to be low maintenance and to go without water but to achieve this it helps to give plants a good head start.  I plunged each pot into a bucket of water for good measure, and slooped water around them after planting to help them settle in.  Good luck to them.

Euphorbia characias ssp. wulfenii

Miraculously Easter Sunday arrived with blue skies and, as if in answer, the yellow Cytisus praecox came into bloom.  I may not have made it to Greece this year, but in a quiet moment when the sprogs are busy finding worms, I can take my coffee out to our drive and plonk myself between nepeta and cistus.  If the sun comes out and I bring my head low enough to the ground, gazing between lime euphorbias and the apple green flowers of the hellebore, I am transported back to the Attican hillsides I visited as a child.