Cretan-homes, Crete property estate agents

A thing of beauty

by Ann Lisney

If your fingers are at all green, creating a new garden here on Crete is – depending on your mood of the day – either a huge challenge or an opportunity to let your imagination run riot.

Before we moved out here, we bought a plot of land and had a new house built. Our builder’s* idea of landscaping had been to send in a JCB to push all the excavated subsoil from the foundations and rubbish from the building works away from the house, so that it tumbled down the slope that was to be our new garden. Over the next days and weeks we felt we got to know those builders quite well – we discovered what cigarettes they smoked, which crisps they ate, what newspapers they read, what soft drinks they liked – even their shoe size! There seemed to be almost no topsoil, of course, just subsoil mixed with bits of tiles, bricks, glass, wire and the occasional half bag of cement. Not a worm was to be seen in all this lot – and when I eventually found one, weeks later, I was so excited I inadvertently cut it in half with my spade.

To make it feel more like home, we naturally wanted to put our stamp on the house as soon as possible.  One of the first things to tackle was the gravel bank that was our driveway. It was feet thick in some spots and soaked up any vehicles that drove over it. We soon got our car stuck - but that did at least serve to break the ice with the neighbours, who all rushed out and directed operations while Rib and I dug out the car.  We decided that we could utilize some of this gravel around the garden-to-be, but first it needed distributing over a wider area. Cue our first visit to a hardware shop to buy buckets and shovel.  Tons of gravel, and we decide to shift it by bucket and shovel?

Having scraped enough gravel off the drive to enable the car to be driven in and out without bogging down, our next task was to tackle the 60 degree slope on the west end of the house.  We get a lot of heavy rain in a Cretan winter, and the run-off is fast and causes erosion quite quickly, so attention was needed to the slope to make it stable long before the autumn rains set in.

The builder had left some unused wire cages which are used to create concrete columns, so we wrapped these in wire mesh and filled them with stones that had been dug up on site. When we ran out of our own stones, we made forays off up through the village and up the hill to pillage from the verges along the tracks. Stones seem to grow very well on Crete! When the farmers come across them in their plots, they just heave them out and put them at the side of the road, which was ideal for us. We then heaved the vast stone-filled wire baskets back into the slope, and leveled the ground out in between to form terraces.

We disguised the fronts of the cages by building dry stone walls and steps, and improved the stony subsoil on the terraced sections with huge bags of compost from the nearest garden center. Then we were ready for our first plantings!

There are a couple of really helpful books which I can recommend here – the first is “Gardening on a Greek Hillside” by Mary Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (ISBN 960-7120-14-0), and the second is “Greece, Garden of the Gods” by Jennifer Gay (ISBN 960-86395-4-9). Both books are very readable, and give lots of helpful information about both cultivated and suitable native plants. They also give the Greek name for the plants (where available), which may be some help when you are puzzling your way around a garden centre in the non-flowering season, trying to recognize leaf shapes.

In our second season, we became much more confident and hacked out a huge new terrace below the house, and set in steps made out of cut log poles. Our planting here has been a little more restricted, as there are olive trees above and we have to remember not to plant anything that will be crushed when we harvest the olives.  However, herbaceous things which die down at the end of the year are ideal, as are spring and autumn bulbs.

The third season saw us creating a fire pit/barbecue area, another paved sitting space and a few dwarf retaining walls made from individually selected pebbles from nearby beaches. I have always been a pebble collector, and this has enabled me to use my lovely pebbles in a useful and decorative way!  We buried a 1500 litre water tank in a bank (filled from rain run-off from the roof), and brought this out to a tap in the middle of a mini-grotto area, where we can fill watering cans.

Our site falls away below the house, with a long view of olive groves, conifers and the occasional fig and almond tree, to the sea in the distance. We have, I suppose, an “infinity” garden, and although we have radically changed the area immediately surrounding the house, we have tried to encourage a more natural feel further away, to blend into the surrounding area. This has involved the planting of many native species and we are always delighted when Nature blows a new gift in over the boundary fence.

The weather in England meant that our garden there was mostly enjoyed from indoors. Here our outdoor areas have become a very significant part of our lives, both in the effort that we have put in over the years and the time that we spend sitting out there, just looking and enjoying and planning.

And is the garden finished yet? Of course not.  I’ve had another idea…….

*(I must point out that our home is at the other end of the island from Abbe and Cretan Homes, so they are not ‘the builder’ referred to here!).