After last week’s stroll through the village of
Agios Ioannis I thought we'd walk down the road for a bit and then cut across into the
valley below where there’s an old olive press that I’ve long wanted to prowl
around. But first, here growing wild at the side of the road is a magnificent
straggling clematis climbing the rocks.
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| The Buttercup family - Ranunculaceae |
Obviously, like anemones and delphiniums, it’s a
type of buttercup. No, I haven’t finally taken leave of my senses they are all
part of the Buttercup family, the Ranunculaceae. But how can such wildly
different looking plants all be closely related? It all comes down to plant
systematics, the biological classification of plants. A couple of hundred years
before Christ was born, a wandering Greek philosopher called Theophrastus
started us off by grouping plants loosely into trees, shrubs and herbs. Another
Greek, Dioscorides who was a medic in the Roman army, refined this a few
hundred years later when he classified over five hundred plants according to
their medicinal properties and this became the standard reference work right up
until the sixteenth century. Classifying plants by their similarities in
structure then took over culminating in Linnaeus publishing his Species Plantarum in 1753 (he dwelt on
their sexual organ arrangements but then, he didn’t get out much). Darwin’s
publication On the Origin of Species in
1859 pushed us towards classifying plants based upon their evolutionary
relationships and nowadays we use DNA analysis to refine that concept in the
science of cladistics (see Taxing Taxonomy and Confusing
Cladistics) and that’s why
clematis is a type of buttercup – they share a common ancestry.
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| St. Antony and Balkan Green Lizard, Lacerta trilineata |
This little old church here, which was built into
the rock about 120 years ago, is dedicated to St. Antony of the desert. I think
that we could do no better than adopt him for our journey as he was a great one
for going off into the wilderness which is what we’re about to do. He lived
variously in a tomb, an abandoned Roman fort and at an oasis, fought demons in
caves and had encounters with satyrs and centaurs. Which rather goes to prove
that living on your own for too long isn’t necessarily a healthy option.
However I expect he had the odd lizard for company which is maybe why this
little Balkan Green lizard is basking outside his church. We're going to cut down left by those pines.
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| Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui and Willow Warblers, Phylloscopus trochilus |
This is our wilderness and it used to be a garden
by the looks of that remnant of a grape trellis. I see that the Painted Ladies
are still with us (I believe that St. Antony was tempted by visions of those as
well but not the butterfly variety) and dancing around the ground in amongst
the foliage are a couple of Willow Warblers. These are winter visitors and
rather similar to chiffchaffs but you can tell the difference by their little
pinkish legs; the chiffchaffs are brown/black. Their call is slightly different
too and if we stand still under the trellis and call to them they’ll probably
call back. It’s a sort of low who-whit
whistle (as opposed to the chiffchaffs which is simply whit). Are you ready? Right, whistle. who-whit. There, they’re answering you.
The garden isn’t as abandoned as it first seemed.
This small citrus-cum-olive grove appears to be well tended. I wonder what
delights it holds in store for us? I’ve found our first mushroom of the season.
Here, growing in the roots of this olive tree. I think that it may be a False
Chanterelle. The reason I say ‘I think’ is that it’s not easy to tell a False
Chanterelle, which at best is inedible and at worst mildly poisonous, from a
true Chanterelle which is delicious. An experienced forager may tell you that the
edible one has an apricot smell – not helpful if you’re slightly anosmic like
me - and a mycologist will tell you that the true Chanterelle has primitive
gills which is great if you’re an expert on gill structures. Add to this that
the poisonous Jack O’lantern looks pretty much the same as both of them and
grows in the same type of habitat and you have a recipe for disaster; quite
literally if you’re thinking of cooking them. This specimen is also rather old
so we’ll have to leave it with a question mark as to what it is.
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| Mud Dauber wasp nest Sceliphron genus |
Finally we’ve reached the old olive press. It’s
rather overgrown with newly emerging giant fennel but I think that we can get
in and poke about. Beware of falling masonry. These are out of the ordinary,
look up here in the corner. These are the nests of Mud Dauber Wasps and this is
the mud that they’ve daubed to create their nurseries. Each cell will hold one
larva which will be provisioned, quite often with one of those Cellar Spiders
that we found last week. We’ve met these wasps before of course (see Only Connect...A Quiz ) but the nests themselves are interesting. In Hoodoo magic (not Voodoo) which is
practised in the American deep south these nests are collected, powdered down
and mixed with other ingredients and used in a variety of spells. Most of these
seem to have to do with keeping people coming back be they errant husbands or
business customers.
Well, there’s a nice bit of magic to finish the
day. The next part of journey seems to take us through the olive groves that
once supplied this press and after that I suspect that we’ll be back in the
wilderness. See you next week.
The Extra Bit
Here’s a
fascinating article on the use of mud dauber nests in Hoodoo magic: A Multipurpose Zoological Curio …
It is
that time of year when we’re all celebrating some sort of winter festival so
whether yours is Christmas, the Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Pancha Ganapati or
one of your own devising may I wish you a very happy one. Merry Whatever, love
Steve x.
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LINKS:
Naturalists
(the facebook page that accompanies this blog)
See detailed pictures at
http://www.inaturalist.org/login (search - people-stevedaniels-observations)
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