Gift of Green Fire and Other Strange Encounters Read online

  Plant varieties such as crocus asturicus and crocus cancellatus in the summer to flower in autumn and perhaps crocus chrysanthus and crocus dalmaticus in autumn to flower in early spring. Crocus laevigatus may be planted in early autumn to flower in late autumn or winter.

  You can leave the bulbs in the ground for two or three years before taking them up and moving them. The small bulb offsets may be removed during the resting period and planted where you want them to grow.

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  There was once a foolish mother - the nymph Oreidia - who boasted her daughter Myrtle was more beautiful than the redoubtable Aphrodite. So that goddess vengefully compelled Myrtle to fall in love and sleep with her father Theias. When he realised what he had done and she fled, he rushed after her with murder in mind. She begged the gods to turn her into a plant and in the blink of an eye, she became a myrtle bush. Nine months later the trunk burst and out sprang Adonis! The story of Myrrh, who turned appropriately into a myrrh tree, has a similar theme.

  It is said that when a myrtle leaf is held to the light it appears pierced with countless needle holes. These are claimed to have been made by Phaedra, Theseus’ wife, who was enraged when rejected by his son Hippolytus. In fact the holes are simply the source of myrtle oil. For others the myrtle symbolised youth and beauty and it was used to decorate sanctuaries and temples.

  A mixture of berry juice and leaves produced a black hair dye. And like so many plants, myrtle also had medicinal uses. Dioscorides claimed it cured respiratory troubles, as well as spider and scorpion bites and that the juice of the cooked berries mixed with wine, soothed inflammation of the intestines. Sometimes it is still used for children with indigestion.

  Less credibly, myrtle was thought to be an antidote to drunkenness - if worn as a crown! And it was popular with gold and silversmiths. A superb gold myrtle wreath was found in a royal tomb at Vergina, Macedonia in 1977. It was probably made in 340 BC.

  The plant even had its own nymphs. Aristaeus, son of Apollo and Cyrene, was taught by myrtle nymphs how to curdle milk for cheese, build bee-hives and cultivate the olive.

  The plant was sacred to Aphrodite, who hid behind a myrtle thicket when she rose from the sea. The plant came to symbolise love, honour and peace. Athletes and other notables wore it as a wreath. In some countries the flowers are thought to bring luck to newly married couples. Bark, leaves and flowers are turned into a perfume oil and alcohol comes from the fermented berries. I remember it well in Corsica, where they have the knack of turning any fruit into the means of instant intoxication.

  Myrtus communis grows in the south - usually as a shrub, but if unimpeded, can become a small tree. After bearing whiskery white flowers, it fruits with black, pea-sized berries.

  A native of the Mediterranean, you may plant myrtus communis in full sun or a sunny, sheltered position. It likes open fertile ground and does not usually need watering. You may train it as a hedge as it responds well to pruning and you can propagate by seeds sown in spring or by cuttings taken in the summer and rooted in a sheltered place.

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  Hyacinthus was a Spartan prince who was fancied by both Apollo and Zephyrus, the West Wind. Hyacinthus admitted his preference for Apollo. But one day when Apollo was showing him how to throw the discus, Zephyrus rose from the west, snatched the discus and hurled it at Hyacinthus’ head. He collapsed and died and Apollo’s tears mingled with his falling blood. Where this stained the grass, a crimson flower grew. Apollo marked it “ai” which is Greek for “alas” and named it hyacinth.

  This is probably the “lily of the valleys” - the “lily that grows among thorns” in the Bible. But to us it is hyacinthus orientalis and comes from Asia Minor.

  The Tassel Hyacinth (muscari comosum), which I have found growing near Maleme, appears to have once been the only wild bulb eaten in Greece. Now it is pickled or boiled and eaten whole or mashed with olive oil and wine vinegar. These bulbs are expensive because they have to be individually dug up.

  A yellow Muscari (muscari macrocarpum) is native to Crete, Amorgos, the eastern Aegean islands and south western Anatolia. It smells like ripe bananas.

  For planting, the hyacinthus orientalis is readily available for pots and boxes. It likes the sun and a loose, moist peaty-sandy soil. Stop watering when the flowers have finished and the plant will rest. Remove old flowering stems and when the leaves have died, lift the bulbs and store them in boxes in a well ventilated place.

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  Lotus was a nymph who fled from an amorous admirer. She came to a lake and after hesitating on the bank, foiled her follower by turning into a lotus tree. A girl called Driope came to the lake with her sister and a baby and seeing the tree in full flower, picked some to make a garland for the child. But from each place where she picked, blood dripped. Terrified, she got up to run away, but could not move. Slowly her body turned to bark and she too, became a lotus tree.

  The lotus was known as the Egyptian water lily and there are several kinds of water lily (nymphaea) you can grow in a pond. Nymphaea rubra, a red water lily, comes from India and will grow in soft mud rich in sedimentary organic material. You can plant it directly in the mud or in a container that can be immersed for easy feeding and propagation. The soil should be a mixture of one part clayey garden earth, one part humus, one part well-seasoned farmyard manure and one part wet river sand.

  Propagate by dividing the rhizomes, cutting the tubers to pieces and putting them in 12 centimetre pots with plain loam. Then immerse them in warm water. After 30 days repot and lower into their flowering positions. Seeds can also be used.

  There are nymphaea odorata, from the eastern United States, a white, short-lived water lily, nymphaea marliacea, a pale yellow horticultural hybrid and nymphaea laydekeri, another hybrid, whose bright red flowers are tinged with pink.

  You can make a pool for them with a fibre glass mould and a wooden frame - like a nailed together box with top and bottom knocked out to contain the mould with space to spare.

  Pour concrete into the space between the frame and the mould and remove the frame when the concrete has set. Collect shells and interesting stones from the beach to cover the concrete. Tiles set at various angles may be put on top and overlap the water’s edge.

  You should fill, empty and scrub the pool four times before use, especially if you plan to keep fish. Otherwise, besides your water lilies, a wide choice of aquatic plants, from water hyacinth and Japanese iris to corkscrew rush, will provide cool contemplation in the sun.

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  Adonis had a tough start in life. He was put in a chest by Aphrodite and given to Persephone to hide in the Underworld. But Persephone was curious. She opened the chest, found Adonis and brought him up.

  Aphrodite was jealous and a court ruled Adonis should spend four months with Persephone and four with Aphrodite, having the rest of the time to himself. But Aphrodite used her magic girdle to compel Adonis to stay with her all year.

  Persephone went to Aries for help and, disguised as a boar, he gored Adonis to death. Aphrodite arrived to find the ground spattered with blood. She sprinkled it with nectar and where every drop fell, a scarlet flower grew - the first anemones.

  Anemone comes from the Greek word anemos - the wind - so it is also called the windflower. People believed the wind had an erotic effect, coaxing it to open. It is known too as the anemone coronaria - the Poppy or Crown anemone. It is believed this is the “lily of the field” which “surpassed Solomon in all his glory”, but several species have equal claim.

  The anemone probably came from the East and has naturalised in the eastern Mediterranean. Dioscorides claimed the juice of the root, taken through the nostrils, cleared the head and the juice was said to also cure skin problems.

  The anemone may be white, pale blue or mauve emboldened by deep red. The red form, coccinea and the purple, cyanea, are most common.

 
; The plant likes damp, humus-rich soil and ample water. It rests after flowering and the rhizomes can be lifted and stored in sand or dry peat. You can sow the anemone’s seed in pans or boxes in the spring and prick out seedlings to plant in early autumn, preferably in a rich loam or potting compost mixed with sand. Or you can divide the rhizomes in spring or autumn. They flower in their second year.

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  The baby boy squirms and thrusts aside the shabby woollen blanket. He howls, abandoned beneath an infinity of stars. Arriving at dawn to clean the church, Hippolyta finds the child abandoned on the steps. He glows in the strengthening sun - a fragile changeling in distress who might have been left by an errant angel. Hippolyta lifts him and, suddenly silent, he scrutinises her with bottomless brown eyes.

  Hippolyta, who has miscarried twice, is allowed to keep the boy whom she calls Antaeus. He grows fast with strong limbs, a mass of unruly black hair and evidence of unnerving insight.

  “Who do you really belong to?” Hippolyta asks. He gazes at her with a solemnity beyond his years. Otherwise, he laughs, plays and misbehaves like any other child.

  When Hippolyta touches his tiny hand, she feels the shock of extreme sensitivity, as though Antaeus perceives her need and her delight in discovering him. As he plays with the toys Hippolyta and her husband, Pholus, give him, he sometimes pauses and lifts a small face - suddenly serious - to the watchful eyes of his mother, and smiles with the reassurance of a responsible young man.

  Hippolyta has the irrational suspicion he has led a previous existence - some life lost in time, in which he had another mother who taught him to respond to maternalism. And, as he grows, Hipployta sometimes finds him motionless among his story books and toys; his dark eyes dancing with reflections of foreknowledge, then focused as though on a momentous past suddenly sensed in the present.

  Antaeus excels at school - although the village boys envy his good looks and the ease with which he cajoles the girls. He merely smiles at their resentment.

  Then one spring day, he vanishes. Distraught - Hippolyta and Pholus scour the neighbourhood in the ageing van that takes them to and from their olive grove. After four days of futile searching, they succumb to despair and sit silently indoors.

  Antaeus follows a strange compulsion that carries him from the village to the shining orange groves. He walks briskly along the winding tracks used by the orange growers, dazzled by sunlight soaking through layers of deep green leaves and creating an abstract play of shadows on the ground.

  He pauses as one of the dancing shades beneath the glowing fruit, shifts into the shape of a woman; her hair spread blackly on pale shoulders. Her flimsy robe flutters in the faint breeze, exposing her exquisite limbs and, with a knowing warmth, she smiles.

  “Antaeus!” she breathes - her voice soft as a subsiding west wind. She steps forward and raises long hands whose fingers flicker in the intermittent sun.

  “Who are you?” asks Antaeus.

  “Pyrrha - your mother,” she replies.

  Antaeus shivers in the sun. “How are you here?”

  “I called you. You came.”

  “But you abandoned me - why?”

  “I didn’t abandon you - I always meant to find you. Your father thought I had lain with another man - that you weren’t his child and would have killed you. Come back to me.”

  “How can I leave the mother who has looked after me so long - she will be heartbroken!” says Antaeus, “ I haven’t seen you for years - where have you been?”

  Pyrrha is silent. She has been unable to curb her seductions - the thrill of sensual conquest as she used the fickle play of light and shade, the dimming edge of day, the ghostly fringes of water and land, to enhance her machinations.

  She could not be monogamous; she was universal, elemental; an intrinsic aspect of the wild. Remorseless and remote while in the heat of hedonistic love.

  “I will fight for you in court,” she says and as an errant shaft of sun turns her to gold, she shimmers on the surface of existence, then is drawn like a beam of lost light into the somnolent air.

  Thoughtfully, Antaeus walks home. Hippolyta opens her arms to him and Pholus shouts a welcome.

  “Where have you been?” asks Hippolyta.

  “I met my mother,” Antaeus replies, “She will fight for me in court.”

  He relates the strange encounter in the orange grove. Hipployta feels her flesh contract with fear. The other woman’s aura enters the stuffy room. It expands - a stifling imposition - a massing of the hot summer air laced with sensuality.

  She cannot sleep. The other woman lies between her and Pholus; a potent presence redolent of orange groves and the salty essence of the sea. Hippolyta feels Pyrrha smiling - confident in the dark - a being whose flesh is not entirely tangible but melds with the drifting elements of air.

  The next day, as Hippolyta sweeps the yard, Pyrrha materialises - soberly dressed in grey; the self satisfied smile still lightly on her strangely bloodless lips. Her black hair, wound loosely about her head, smells faintly of the sea. She hands Hippolyta a court summons. Hippolyta is about to voice her indignation, when Pyrrha softly folds and fades, leaving only a trace of salt on the air.

  Antaeus returns from school to find Hippolyta stony-faced and still clutching the summons. Instinctively he knows what it is, and touching her arm, says “She can’t take me away - she abandoned me. You are my mother.”

  Hipployta draws him to her and tries to smile, but, as though sensing the unearthly power Pyrrha possesses, begins to cry.

  The judge’s gaze repeatedly returns to Pyrrha’s eyes, shot with the translucence of the summer sea. He barely hears her words but knows he cannot dismiss her claim to Antaeus. Then he hears Hipployta’s plea and seeing a simple woman stunned by the appearance of this magical mother, decrees she looks after Antaeus for six months of the year, then gives him to Pyrrha for the remaining six months.

  Hippolyta pales, relieved she has not entirely lost Antaeus, but consumed with sudden fear.

  Antaeus feels ambivalent - loyal to Hipployta and Pholus, yet identifying with the woman of the orange grove. He is to spend the first six months with her. Tearfully, he leaves Hipployta and Pholus and is taken by Pyrrha to her white house perched on a limestone rock above the surging sea.

  Antaeus watches in awe as Pyrrha appears to float about the rooms where the waves are reflected like a second sea on the white walls. Pyrrha wears diaphanous robes of green and blue, shot with gold thread that glints in the sun. She seems a woman one moment, an intangible being of the sea, the next.

  She concocts strange dishes for Antaeus that melt in the mouth before yielding an unidentifiable taste. She speaks with poetic softness of how Antaeus belongs to the rocks and rich soil, the salt water and the sky. He must rise above the petty preoccupations of man.

  Antaeus sits at her feet shod in silver slippers and listens to tales of gods and goddesses, bizarre transformations and amorous encounters. He learns of rustic vegetation gods inhabiting the sighing depths of damp woods, their hands as gnarled as the twisted trees, grasping the white waists of sloe-eyed nymphs.

  He hears of the great sea god who stables white horses under the waves, which draw him in a golden chariot or are released to toss to and fro on the tide. And he learns of the greatest god, living on the peak of a mountain mesmerised by mist and who descends as a beast or bird in pursuit of mortal women.

  “We have both lived before, you know!” says Pyrrha suddenly one day. “We shared the wild world of the gods.”

  Antaeus grows rapidly, his mind flowing freely, his limbs long and straight. He discovers the secrets of seduction as Pyrrha associates with young men who appear, as though soundlessly summoned, at her door.

  Then he returns to Hippolyta. He warms to the simplicity and peace of her home and respects her uncomplicated gestures of love. Yet he misses the unearthly, the miraculous and the sensual potency of Pyrrha.

  He seeks Pan in the near
by woods, effervescent water nymphs in the reed-thick river. And he looks to the mountains, imagining the great god Zeus, planning his next seduction among the women of the mortal world.

  One day he tells Hippolyta these stories, waiting for her eyes to widen in wonder. But she merely smiles. She has heard them before. “They are myths - made up by men long ago,” she says.

  Antaeus is dashed. He falls silent but knows Pyrrha is right to believe in their integrity. After six months he returns to her. Her sea soft eyes are purposeful. “Antaeus, I want you to stay with me all the time,” she says. “You are not like other men. You may not be immortal but you should know the wonders worked by the gods and live your life with this knowledge that will lift you from the narrow ways of men.”

  Antaeus tries to resist. He feels the force of Hippolyta’s affection and sees her sitting in patient isolation. But, daily, Pyrrha places her long white hands on his dark, unruly head, applying gentle pressure that renders him part of her unworldly flesh.

  He does not return to Hippolyta. After four days of anxious waiting, she goes to the white house on the limestone rock and sees Antaeus laughing with Pyrrha in the stone-strewn garden. “Come to me!” she pleads, struggling up the hill overlooking the sea.

  Antaeus looks at her, bewildered. She is familiar yet of no significance. He turns back to Pyrrha, seeking her transparent hand. Hippolyta gazes at them in dismay and disbelief. Pyrrha gazes back - a triumphal smirk on her unearthly face.

  Behind the great grey stone in the garden wall, Hippolyta finds the battered box of money she has saved throughout the years. The next day she hires Manolis, so poor he will carry out any request for a pittance, and tells him to murder Pyrrha.

  Manolis goes to the white house at night, creeping through the olives to the low wall and on through cactus and tall thistle to the house, its ghostliness increased by moonlight. He finds the kitchen door unlocked and slides inside. A shadow bends over the stove in the moonlight. His sight is poor, but it must be Pyrrha checking all is well before retiring. He creeps up and, swiftly throws out his arm. But it is a man, who wrestles, writhes and cries out. Then he lies motionless on the floor.