gardnslave's Blog

Normally Fritz didn’t stink like cat piss.

For the last two weeks we had spent hours every day swimming and snorkelling in the Red Sea near Dahab. With no fresh water for washing, apart from salty skin, we were really clean.  He was intermittently snoring and gurgling in his sleep  in a strange way, as if his throat had been cut. He’ll be alright, I flicked sand off my face and snuggled deeper into my sleeping bag.

“Fritz stop doing that! If you spit on me again I am going to … Oh shizzle”,

“Fritz wake up….WAKE UP you dopey Austrian there’s a camel chewing the leaves on this palm tree.”

The date palm had become our home. We had set up a makeshift camp, during the day time we buried our rucksacks in the sand and wandered away down the endless beaches to a bay where an Israeli girl had built a shack. She had food and water that desert Arabs brought her and sold glasses of water to travellers who happened by.

I met Fritz at Nuweba, a tiny settlement in the Sinai. We blagged food from religious hippies who had a curious tented compound, they would feed us a meal if we joined in their Bible reading and hymn singing at night in a massive Boy Scout tent. Nuweba was a bit safe for me and Fritz, and when somebody told us about the Israeli girl near Dahab and the monastery at Santa Katarina we hitched a lift in a pick up truck and settled into life under a date palm.

The desert is a truly beautiful place, of course there isn’t much vegetation as we know it here in England, but there is loads to see, sort of grasses, weeds and random scruffy bushes. We had hatched a plan to catch wild camels and take tourists (we assumed that there would be tourists in the town) on camel safaris to Santa Katarina.

The few date palms around were clearly a magnet for wandering camels. The Arab owners hobbled them at night, but they could still roam enough to find food. The date palms weren’t the lovingly trimmed things we see on the esplanades around the Med, they were constantly pillaged by camels and home to roosting birds, each was like an individual oasis for the creatures there.

Things are looking up

We loved our date palm, even tried climbing up into it. Big mistake. They have evil spikes at the base of the fronds, somehow the camels got around that, but we cut ourselves to ribbons before submitting to raucus laughter from the ‘real’ camel herders. Early morning when it was quite cool we would lay in our sacs looking up into the tree watching spiders and birds, insects of all sorts wandering around happily in their private world.

One day we were laying on some sand dunes watching the foam floats we had put onto some baited line to try and catch fish for the Israeli girl to cook and sell. We didn’t wear clothes, there was no point. During the daytime it was hot, nobody else wore clothes except the Arabs, so it came as a shock when we saw two girls wandering down the beach wearing bikinis. Fritz was off like a greyhound after the rabbit, Leonie and Nurit arrived in our lives and things took another bizarre twist.

Nurit was stunning, an Israeli with eyes like melted amber, Fritz fell in love instantly so I was left to pal up with Leonie. She had been working in London and was staying with Nurit in Beersheva on her way back to Australia for Christmas. Leonie had travelled overland as far as possible from Australia a couple of years previous, her tales of pig toilets, drug dealers in Thailand, the temples in Burma and so on were more grist to the mill for my wanderlust.

Within a few days Fritz said he was going back to Beersheva with Nurit so me and Leonie kind of tagged along. We spent a few weeks in Nurit’s flat. It was nearing time for Leonie to make her way to Athens for her flight home. She said that I should go along with her and stay with her family in Australia for Christmas. So, as you do? I agreed. In Athens I had to blag a visa at the Australian embassy, saying we were going to get married in Sydney and that was it. Thai airlines had gone on strike, so when we got the airport we had to be put up in a 5* hotel in Athens for 2 days, the flight eventually took off and we had to spend another night gratis in Bankok before arriving in Melbourne.

Of course this is where the gardening and obsession with plants evolved. In Melbourne we had to exit the plane on the tarmac a long walk from the terminal. My first impression was of the humidity, heat and smell. The astringent head clearing smell of Eucalyptus, it was so overpowering that I expected Skippy to hop across the runway, and passport control to be a koala chewing a gum leaf.

Ted was a great travel companion. He regaled me with details of a trip taken to Israel the previous year during his summer break from uni. The bus journey was long and very rough, buses in those days on Crete were little more than a truck with wooden benches. He talked of tensions and a society that had adopted traditions from everywhere, of Bedouin settlements,  mesmerising cities such as Jerusalem, the Red Sea! Man it was gripping stuff and I just couldn’t wait to get there and see for myself. We stopped in Heraklion to visit Knossos. Walking through the town Ted bought us both a straw hat. A discussion followed about where the straw came from to make the hats, we both guessed wrong as it turned out. Somewhere I have a pic of me standing behind a part demolished red pillar at the Palace of Minos near the main entrance wearing my straw hat.

The Cretan countryside was ram jammed full of exotic looking plants and trees. As I was to learn later, many of these were found throughout the Sydney gardenscape. The towns and villages were bedecked with pots of brilliantly coloured flowers, most I didn’t know but the geraniums struck a chord, my mother always grew them in a big pot by the front door along with dark blue lobelia. A wonderful combination that I still use today for my clients.

Geraniums on every doorstep

We eventually arrived late at night at Lerapetra. With barely a light  in the town we bumbled our way to the sea and found a beach outside of town to bed down for the night. The following day we hiked out to a tiny cove where  travellers had been living in self-constructed shelters for some time. We got there and found all occupied so had to construct our own. We found some sheets of old plastic and driftwood but nothing was particularly long to raise the roof. A dried out wadi had a stand of bamboo and we decided to cut some to create a spectacular shelter. Another pic somewhere in the archives.

Have you ever tried to cut mature bamboo? It needs a diamond saw or anvil loppers to make any impression. A South African had a rusty machete which we eventually hacked out several pieces and used some old string to cobble things together. I never realised that bamboo was so robust, my only previous encounter with bamboo was in a Chinese restaurant.  This prompted a careful inspection of the thicket and I soon realised what a wonderful plant bamboo can be.

We pitched up there until Kevin finally arrived. He looked like he had been through the mangle, nasty cuts on his legs and arms where he had fallen constantly on the untreated roads, been knocked off his bike with a moped tractor! and found another outrageous traveller in the shape of a beautiful German girl attempting to ride her bike down the Cape Town…wow

Each day I spent hours in the pine woods on the headlands, wandering around appreciating all the shrubs and trees, nothing was planted by humans it was all natural and very, very scruffy. I loved it.

Swimming was incredible, crystal clear water with loads and loads of rocks to dive off…and that was where this trip ended. I dived off a rock and decided to swim down to the bottom, without a mask it was impossible to see clearly and as I pushed off the bottom I got a massive piercing stab in my foot. Sea urchin. The ball of my foot below the big toe was covered in needles. Most couldn’t be dug out and I had to make the decision to go home for treatment. When I got to the hospital in Lancaster it was a first for everyone there, nobody had been asked to remove embedded sea urchin spines before.

For months my mind mulled over the sights, the crazy people, but most of all I remember the scents and the smells from living for a few months in the bush and assimilating all that the magnificent plant world had to offer. I had no camera so no record remained to identify those plants but I couldn’t wait to go again with a Plant Finder in my bag.  Lovely green England had lost it’s appeal and I longed for the sun and harsh strange plants of the Mediterranean.

What on earth prompted me to start working for myself as a gardener in 1977? Need. Pure and simple need to earn some money and stay alive. Arriving via a strange route I had been living on the poverty line in Australia for almost a year.

Two years earlier, 1975 saw me scuttling off to find somewhere warmer to live for Winter. The Magic Bus took me to Athens where it wasn’t too warm in late November so I hopped on a ferry to Crete. In Chania I met up with some other travellers, we were quaffing ouzo when somebody suggested a beach they had heard about , info collected from some hippies they had stayed with on Hydra. A crazy bus trip, chaperoned by a driver who argued incessantly with passengers, took us to a pebble beach at the foot of the Samaria Gorge. An American, Kevin H, who was cycling around the world and collecting recipes as he went, infused my mind with a whole new dimension and I was propelled on a wild and improbable journey.

We set off past Oleander and Bignonia hedges

We camped on the beach for around a week, everyone sharing travel experiences and my desire to be an explorer mushroomed out of control. Kevin was instrumental in firing me up to travel further afield with his improbable tales of his journey to that point. More like a wandering Bohemian, searching for something, instinctively goading me on, I had to keep moving to find it for myself.

One morning I decided to walk up into the gorge as far as I could. My hillwalking experience in the Lake District had prepared me well. I loaded up my Haston Alpiniste with supplies for a couple of days and kicked off up the barren gorge. I quickly found it wasn’t barren at all, the place was filled with life, the high pitched chirring of cicadas, insects, bugs, lizards, unknown birds and loads of very different types of vegetation.

Thinking back I am sure it was the herbs, so natural to these areas, but only known to me as dried up dust in the kitchen back home, that started me looking at things a little closer. Of course plants don’t run away when you want to see them, they just sit there obligingly and as the heat of the day built I took refuge more frequently in the shade of boulders and cliffs. As I sat there sipping a little water, rationing my chunky bread and cheese I noticed flowers and different leaves, some with strange seed heads, others spreading out and looking like a fish out of water in this arid area. Where did they get sufficient moisture to survive? The scents in the warm air were somehow familiar.

It was here that my need to identify plants developed. Right then I couldn’t do anything about it, but later, in Australia my mind became spongelike and I soaked up as much knowledge as possible with the massive array of exotic plants on offer.

Muted voices and tumbling rocks took me by surprise, I thought that people were in the cliffs above throwing stones at me so that I would run away into the waiting arms of some robbers.  My gut lurched and I started to flee.  After a few paces I was stunned to notice eyes looking down at me, goat’s yellow eyes. Phew what relief. The gorge was famous for the wild goats and when I looked more closely the whole area was full of them in the most impossible places, nibbling on whatever vegetation they could find.

I went on up and out to the higher ground and found myself walking over herb fields, literally fields of common kitchen herbs that filled the air with their scent. This was also my first encounter with fat tailed sheep, a young lad with a couple of mangy looking dogs was tending the sheep. My head in a whirl with all this new stuff I pitched a tent nearby and crashed for the night, listening to the bells of the sheep as they tinkled away.

Back on the beach the following day we hatched a plan for Kevin to cycle along a rough coastal road whilst myself and Ted, a red haired Londoner, were to travel to another beach at the other end of the island where we intended to visit Heraklion and meet up with Kevin if he managed to negotiate the rough track.