Landscaping
The hilsides of Kythnos are pure phrygana, and in high summer they are brown and sere with only knee-high thorny bushes poking up among rock outcrops. For 25 years, until our retirement and relocation to Greece in 2001, this is the only way we saw it.
We could not begin to grow trees or ornamental flowers and bushes during our summer sojourns because of the presence of herds of semi-wild goats roaming these hillsides. These animals devour anything and everything that has succulent growing tips and buds.
Enclosure was a necessary pre-condition for establishing a garden, for without the protection of walls, we would merely be providing meals for marauding goats.
Goats were the lifeblood of the islanders (before the advent of tourism). They provided milk, meat and the cheese for which Kythnos has been famous since antiquity. To us, they were a menace. Penned up in the spring to provide easy access for shepherds, they were allowed to roam the hillsides freely for the rest of the year. The stone perimeter walls, unless constantly monitored and maintained, were not a barrier for them. Although herds have decreased considerably over the years, it only takes one goat to inflict damage. Young trees and plants, regarded as delicacies, don't stand a chance of survival.
Our brief summer visits presented two other major problems: we were not there at the right time of year for planting (mid-winter); and we weren't there to water young, tender plants during the crucial hot and dry period of late summer.
A few native species were relatively safe: fig trees and grape vines are tough enough to withstand drought and even occasional grazing by errant goats. Our fisherman friend Manolas Psaras obliged us by planting the first fig trees in 1982, and followed with a few grape vines dotted around GBB I in 1985. He used the island technique of piling thorny bushes around the cuttings, supplemented with chicken wire cages, as protection against goats. The wind, however, as we soon discovered, was the other enemy. Only trees and vines planted next to GBB I were sufficiently protected and survived to maturity.
Making a Garden
By 1987, we had completed a wall in front of the two structures, GBB I and GBB II, incorporating a wrought iron gate. The cheap and fast solution for enclosing the rest of the area immediately surrounding our buildings was a chain-link fence; not an aesthetic choice, but we consoled ourselves with the fact that, as it rusted soon after its installation, it nearly disappeared against the background. The next year, Manolas planted tamarisks within the front terrace beds; he tried placing some outside the fence, protected in the island manner, but only one, located just above the well, survived.
In addition, we had covered some of the slope around the buildings with bouzi — a form of succulent called ice plant or (incongruously) Hottentot fig in English. It is much used, some would say overused, in Greece, because it quickly covers and holds bare ground, is drought-resistant, and nearly indestructible.
Thus began our cultivation of a garden space that would eventually, we hoped, be in lush contrast to the spare beauty of the phrygana surrounding it. However, making it into more than the rudimentary beginnings of a garden had to await our permanent relocation to Greece in 2001.
With an enclosed area secure from goat depredations, and planting beds defined by terrace walls, we could begin serious gardening. The first beds to receive our attention were the ones closest to our living quarters: the side terrace between GBB I and GBB III, and a small terrace on the seaward side of the front patio.
By our third year into the project, we had these areas filled with greenery and vivid color for most of the year. A bay tree and a pomegranate provide vertical accents, as well as being useful in the kitchen. Jasmines and mint-family herbs (rosemary, sage, lavendar and peppermint) line walkways and steps, where passing hands can brush them and release their delicate scents.
Most spectacular is a vivid bougainvillea, that staple of all Greek gardens, that now climbs into an arbor above our bedroom door, thriving after its roots found their way into the nearby cesspool.
A plant with special meaning for us is a lily named Clivia with long, jade-green blades and an orange flower. Because it multiples rapidly, it now occupies many of our narrow planters. Its ancestor was brought from Smyrna by Christos' grandmother, who came to Athens with her family and their full household in 1919, three years ahead of the 1922 devastation of the Greek population by the Turks and the burning of the city.
The terraces step up by alternating wedge-shaped platforms, each planted with a different species of tree, and interspersed with narrow planters filled with colorful flowers. One terrace has three carobs, which we have grown from seeds harvested from a gnarled old tree in Park Guell, Barcelona. Gaudi, the designer of the park, modified his scheme for an adjacent stoa in order to save this old specimen. The other terraces contain a pair each of pistachios and olives.
An area behind GBB III, a particularly rocky and steeply sloped site, has been designated as a cactus and succulent garden. Kathy built a low stone wall along the path at the bottom of the slope, and incorporated a stone bench, which affords a view to the sea through an arched opening in the boundary wall. The core of the cactus garden plantings were again the result of scavenging. On an autumn hike to the cove to the south, Kathy found a series of plants that had just been uprooted and thrown over the wall of a neighbor's compound. She "rescued" them.
Also from Barcelona came seeds of horsetail pines (casuarinas), which we brought back to Vrilissia, started in pots, and transplanted behind GBB III, in a terrace that also contains to regular pine trees.
We have tried several times to grow vegetables, with only moderate success. For example, one early spring, Kathy scattered radish seeds in a terrace bed. The next day, she noticed a thick trail of ants snaking up the back wall of this terrace. Upon closer inspection, she saw that each ant was carrying a small seed. Her total harvest from this experiment was two small radishes. But, she learned a valuable lesson -- to thwart the ants, it is better to start seeds in small pots and transplant them when the seedlings are too big for the little bandits to cart away.
After we built the big water cistern in the ravine, we enclosed the area between it and the east entrance gate to our compound with a stone wall. In this area, we built a raised bed, filled it with soil augmented with compost from our compost operation and attempted to grow vegetables: nothing exotic, just tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and zucchini.
This endeavor has met with very limited success. We get lush foliage but, with the exception of eggplants, small and sparse fruitings.
Kathy has had more success planting in containers perched on a small table next to the potting bench. (For some reason, the ants haven't found their way in to cart off the seeds before they sprout).
Romaine lettuce, almira and herbs happily thrive here, enriching our summertime meals.
It has been a steep learning curve, for neither of us have experience in gardening. We were ignorant of the importance of such basic facts as the PH of the soil; many an inappropriate plant languished and died, as we slowly acquired the knowledge of which species can grow in our soil and climate. Starting a compost operation and beginning to systematically enrich the soil and mulch the plants has increased our success rate. Another improvement that greatly increased survival rates was to install a drip watering system. (The composting and drip irrigation systems are described in detail in the section on sustainable living.)
Our garden is now a joy for most months of the year, but it is far from finished. And that fact is another source of joy, for a garden is a living thing. We are nurturing it through its childhood and adolescence, and look forward to watching it grow up.
The Great Oak Forest of Kythnos
Kythnos in ancient times was heavily forested, and even up to this century it had woodlands with Valonian oak species. This nearly extinct oak used to thrive in the Mediterranean, and, in fact, several isolated trees and a woodland still stand on the neighboring island of Kea. They were once trees considered invaluable for tanning, and their acorns were fed to the pig each family raised for slaughter around the Christmas holidays.
Tanning is no longer practiced, and pigs are offered commercial feed. Goats nibble off any upstart seedlings before they can grow enough to survive the assault. On Kythnos, to our knowledge, only one Valonian oak exists.
Christos has harbored dreams of an oak grove on Gastromeni since at least the mid-1990s, when we lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, in an area full of majestic oak trees.
At this point, we feel we should spare the reader the anti-climactic end of this story: there IS no "Great Kythnos Oak Forest" — except as a surviving aspiration. This is a cautionary tale of trial and failure, of ignorance, and of gradual, on-going education.
We have made several attempts at plantings, and what we have to show for them are a few saplings, about 2-3 meters high at ten years of age. The first effort involved acorns brought from North Carolina and scattered on the land. We think that the resident mice had a feast. As a friend knowledgeable in such matters said, trying to grow red, white and water oaks from North Carolina on Kythnos was like trying to grow olive trees in Alaska.
The acorns we planted the second time, in 2002, were gathered in Greece, but were not of the Valonian species. We simply picked up acorns wherever we found them, and got them started in pots, where they sprouted with great success. We transplanted them into the area above the present south wall of the compound, below the water storage tank. We laid out the holes in an octagonal pattern, sympathetic to the geometry of the structures, in order (as we joked with our son, who was "volunteered" to do the digging) that aliens passing above in UFOs would know that human intelligence was at work.
Whatever it was, intelligence it was not. Despite gentle transplanting, a compost-enriched hole, and careful watering, all but one of the saplings were dead within two years.
At this point, we established contact with the Society of Friends of the Valonian Oak, and with a husband-wife couple, Mr. and Mrs. Theodoridis, who are expending considerable effort to re-establish Valonian oaks in places where they once thrived. They gave us acorns, and offered advice about planting. Apparently, it is preferable to start the acorns directly in the ground, laid horizontally about 5-6 cm below the surface (and not in the cavernous holes our son was forced to dig). Before any growth is evident above ground, the acorn has sprouted a tap root which can be 30-40 cm long before a sprout emerges. In a pot, the tap root is forced into helical growth, with detrimental effects on the tree's potential for survival.
In December of 2007, we planted about two dozen acorns from Kea, about six of which survived the first winter. Most sprouted, but inexplicably died after about a year. We replaced these with new acorns in December 2009, at the same time planting another 40 or so on the hillside near the driveway.
A half-dozen seedlings sprouted from these 40 acorns. We added a couple of new oak seedlings, purchased from the nursery at Kaisariani, planted in deep holes beside the cistern. These have survived and are now taller than us.
We theorized that salt spray might be inhibiting growth, so we decided to test our theory by planting our ten healthiest looking acorns as far away from the sea as possible, at the far eastern boundary of the land, about 400 meters from the sea and at an elevation of nearly 130 meters. All but one sprouted, and six saplings have survived to the present day. From our compound, we can even see one of them on the skyline.
