For more than a score of years, my husband Christos and I visited our vacation house on the Cycladic island of Kythnos, Greece only during summers, and thus, we saw only a barren hillside.
Then, in 2002, a revelation: we came in early spring, to a land transformed by a carpet of crocuses.
The previous autumn, we had retired from university positions in the US, and had relocated to Greece; since then, we have lived here year-round, splitting our time between an apartment in a suburb of Athens and our "country place" on Kythnos. After seeing that profusion of flowers the first spring, I became fascinated with the variety of plants in bloom, and began to photograph them. I now have an archive depicting nearly 200 species in all stages of growth — more than 2,000 images.
All are of plants I found growing on our own land: 9 hectares of hillside, sloping sharply upward from sea-level to about 100 meters, and situated on the western side of Kythnos midway between the port and the southern tip of the island.
For information on Kathy and Christos Saccopoulos' Kythnos house, which is a complex of innovative polyhedral, ferrocement structures, please visit our website