Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Wildlife
For anyone who has seen Greece at the height of summer with its brown
parched hillsides and desert-like ambience, the richness of the wildlife - in
particular the flora - may come as a surprise. As winter warms into spring,
the countryside transforms itself into a mosaic of coloured flowers, which
attract a plethora of insect life, followed by birds. Isolated areas, whether
islands or remote mountains such as Olympus, have had many thousands of
years to develop their own individual species. Overall, Greece has around six
thousand species of native flowering plants, nearly four times that of Britain
but in the same land area. Many are unique to Greece, and make up about
one-third of Europe's endemic plants.
Plants
Whereas in temperate northern Europe plants flower from spring until autumn, the
arid summers of Greece confine the main
flowering period
to the spring, a narrow
window when the days are bright, the temperatures not too high and the groundwater
supply still adequate. In Rhodes and eastern Crete this begins in early March, western
Crete in early April, the Peloponnese and eastern Aegean mid- to late April, and the
Ionian islands in early May, though a cold dry winter can cause several weeks' delay. In
the high mountains the floral “spring” arrives in summer, with the alpine zones of
central and western Crete in full flower in June, and mainland mountain blooms
emerging in July.
The delicate flowers of early spring - orchids, fritillaries, anemones, cyclamen, tulips
and small bulbs - are replaced as the season progresses by more robust shrubs, tall
perennials and abundant annuals, but many of these close down completely for the
fierce
summer
. A few tough plants, like shrubby thyme and savory, continue to flower
through the heat and act as magnets for butterflies.
Once the worst heat is over, and the first showers of
autumn
arrive, so does a second
“spring”, on a much smaller scale but no less welcome after the brown drabness of
summer. Squills, autumn cyclamen, crocus in varying shades, pink or lilac colchicum,
yellow sternbergia and other small bulbs all come into bloom, while the seeds start to
germinate for the following year's crop of annuals. By the new year, early spring bulbs
and orchids are flowering in the south.
Coastal species
Plants on the
beach
grow in a difficult environment: fresh water is scarce, salt is in
excess, and dehydrating winds are often very strong. Feathery
tamarisk
trees are adept
at surviving this habitat, and consequently are often planted to provide shade. On hot
THE FIRST NATURALISTS
Despite an often negative attitude to wildlife, Greece was probably the first place in the world
where it was an object of study.
Theophrastos
(372 - 287 BC) from Lésvos was the first
recorded botanist and a systematic collector of general information on plants, while his
contemporary,
Aristotle
, studied the animal world. During the first century AD the
distinguished physician
Dioscorides
compiled a herbal study that remained a standard work
for over a thousand years.
