Local Distinctiveness: Cornfield Tulips and Horizontal Flax
IN CRETE IN THE SPRING OF 2010 I watched a farmer picking wild tulips by the armful to take to the market in Chania. They were growing like weeds in a wheat field, and were a species found nowhere else in the wild but one small region in the centre of Crete. Tulipa doerfleri’s presence on the island is paradoxical. It’s globally rare, but depends for its survival not on isolation in the wild but on cultivation of the soil, which disperses its bulblets. It’s confined to Crete, but cannot have been here before the introduction of agriculture 7,000 years ago. The flowers have a sultry, Middle-Eastern glamour. The exteriors of the cowled red petals are dusted with satiny gilt, and inside are fired by a fierce scarlet which flares from a dark beauty spot at the base of the bloom. It is one of 159 plant species endemic to Crete, which make up nearly 10 per cent of the total native flora of 1,735 species.
An endemic is a species which is highly adapted to a circumscribed location, and grows nowhere outside it. Its niche can be as big as an island continent, or as small as a cave. The only qualification is that there are no records of the plant occurring of its own accord in wild haunts elsewhere. Endemism is an ambivalent existential state. It may represent the last rites for a wild species (as it did for Wood’s cycad), bedded down in a single vulnerable, vanishing habitat with no long-term future. Or a new stage in its evolution, as it adapts genetically to a new refuge. Endemism is still a condition through which species enter and exit the world, as Charles Darwin found with the finches on the Galapagos Islands which were so crucial in forming his theory of evolution.
Sibthorp and Bauer’s Flora Graeca expeditions provided early evidence of Crete’s endemics. Their party landed at Chania, on the north coast, in April 1786 and immediately set about exploring the mountains and gorges inland. On the walls and surrounding rocks of St John the Hermit monastery they found some of the island’s specialities:
[W]e gathered the Ebony of Crete [Ebenus creticus] the white Fleabane [Conyza candida] the Immortal of the East [Gnaphalium orientale] while the soft cotonny Dictamny [Origanum dictamnus] carpetted its sides, among the Rocks we found many other curious Plants which the licentious Goats & the burning Sun had spared us … A Plant that pleased me above all the rest was Stahelina arborea of which we brought off a Tree covered with its Flowers & shining with its silver Leaves.
Without quite realising it the pair had struck a seam of plants unique to Crete.
T. doerfleri was in neither Flora Graeca nor Flora Europaea, published more than a century later. It may be one of the most recently evolved endemics. It was recognised as a distinct species only late in the twentieth century, having been previously lumped in with the very similar T. orphanidea. This species differs chiefly in its chromosomal pairings and grows in Greece and western Turkey. Like T. doerfleri it is an ‘archaeophyte’ – that is, not a true native species but introduced, deliberately or accidentally, by early settlers. Changes in behaviour, for instance developing the habit of mimicking an annual, often happen with species that become entangled with processes of cultivation and are subject to unusual environmental pressures and selection processes. No one knows the authentically wild ancestor of these two tulips (T. kurdica from northern Iraq might be a candidate), but one can imagine its adaptable offspring moving north-west with the first farmers. One strain became isolated on a secluded Cretan plateau and, over just a few thousand years, evolved into a distinct species.
Other Cretan endemics are like dialect variations of a familiar vegetal glossary. The woody goosegrass, Galium fruticosum, has long, sticky tendrils emerging from a solid trunk, like a jester’s whip with a handle. There is a highly local St John’s wort, Hypericum jovis, confined to the god Jove’s redoubts in high mountain cliffs and gorges. The classic site of the small white-flowered catchfly Silene antri-jovis is inside his subterranean refuge (‘Zeus Cave’) in the centre of the island. Cretan ebony, seen by Sibthorp, is probably the island’s best known endemic. It’s a bushy member of the pea family with pink flowers and silver-haired leaves, which grows in great clusters on limestone outcrops. From a distance it makes roadside cuttings look as if they’re covered with flowering heather, lightly dusted with hoar frost.
Crete’s hoard of endemics is a legacy of its geographical evolution. It began to progress towards island status more than 10 million years ago, as the Mediterranean Sea alternately rose and receded. Plants Crete had previously shared with the adjoining land masses of Greece and northern Africa were cut off when the land bridges were inundated; and as they adapted to new hermetic ecologies, began their slow divergence into distinct varieties and ultimately new species. Then, about 2 million years ago, Crete was rocked by stupendous earth movements that cleaved it with more than a hundred gorges, mostly running north – south. It was as if an already isolated island had acquired a sub-family of subterranean islands, each with its own unique environmental conditions. They became hothouses for the forging of new species.
The deepest and most magnificent of the gorges is Samaria. On the map it seems undistinguished and far from solitudinous, a slightly curved line, which could very well be a road, running north–south in the western corner of the island and ending up in a small resort on the Mediterranean coast. From the high vantage point of the map maker there isn’t any hint that it takes you on a climatic journey between the alpine and the subtropical, dropping 4,000 feet in less than fourteen miles. Or that despite being an abyss, an emptiness, it is as paradoxically full of life and disorientating ecological spaces as a forest, including a society of plants which are growing horizontally.
To walk down the Samaria gorge is to feel an echo in your body of the stresses plants must adapt to as they move out of the common greenery of mountain woodland to the parched verticals of the cliff faces. The local writer Alibertis Antonis has described the walk in Delphic terms, as if the journey of the self and the endurance of plants were the same kind of mortal experience. He asks:
What is Samaria? Is it a bottomless gorge? Is it a perilous but protective path? … Yes [but] it is also the forest’s sensation, the animals and plants’ uniqueness, the waters and the springs’ charm, the wind’s fresh puff rushing through the ‘gates’. It is a combination of history and legend. It is the past and the present. It is the fatigue and the audacity. It is the diffusion and completeness.
(The ‘gates’ – portales – are the points where the sides of the gorge narrow to about ten feet. They may have had physical gates once. Eleven people were drowned here in the 1990s when flash floods barged through the gap.)
The track begins high on the Omalos plateau, where there are fields full of more wild tulips, including the endemic pink-flowered Tulipa cretica. It’s a deceptively cosy start. You open a wooden gate from the road, as if you are about to step into a garden. Aubrietias on cottage walls by the roadside blend seamlessly with wild colonies on the rimrocks of the gorge. There are wooden steps and a handrail. Soon the path steepens, the steps are fewer, and you find you are spending too much time looking at your feet. There is no obvious sightline deep amongst the tall pines, but you’re quickly conscious of the kind of space you are entering. It is a world of insistent, precipitous verticals. The roots of ancient cypresses on the slopes above flow down the cliffsides like lava. Huge boulders are scattered about, hurled to the gorge floor by tectonic spasms and mudslides. A pine tree drips resinous candy-floss onto the path as solitary bees drill into its branches. Long trains of nose-to-tail processionary caterpillars climb the trunks in the opposite direction. Pollen falling from the newly opened oriental plane flowers forms gold halos round the rock pools, brief interludes of horizontality.
As the trees open out into patches of sunlight, the flowers begin: Cretan cyclamen, turban buttercups, and then – longed for but laughably unexpected when I find it while answering ‘the call of nature’ – the endemic peony Paeonia clusii, pure white, gold stamened, and itself crouched under a bush. Its scent is powerful, drowsy, tinged with spice. For a moment it reminds me of the aroma of the moonflower (p. 320), and I wonder if some twist of convergent evolution has made these two species from different continents and different families share a similar perfume, or whether it’s my intoxicated memories that are converging.
Halfway down, the immense gorge-side cliffs fill the sky. Their special botanical denizens are known as ‘chasmophytes’, species adapted to living on arid and almost soilless vertical rock faces. To succeed here they must have root systems capable of penetrating tiny crevices and foliage tolerant of dehydration and fierce sun. It also helps if they have showy flowers to attract insects and make abundant seed. Even quite low down on the cliffs there are exuberant purple-flowered and silver-haired knapweed relatives (including Sibthorp’s Stahelina arborea), bushes of coronilla hung with globes of cream, the bizarre blue-flowered Cretan wall lettuce, Petromarula pinnata, with tall spikes of flowers that resemble kinked propellers, and the best of the gorge endemics, the bushy, bright yellow flax, Linum arboreum growing at the very highest levels. Competition amongst these plants isn’t often a matter of outgrowing or smothering other species. Many are growing singly or in small groups, surrounded by barren rock in which there are no opportunities for colonisation. Their future depends on chance, the successful lodging of one of their seeds in an untenanted crevice. If it germinates, its life will be precarious, at the mercy of landslides and heavy rains. If it succumbs, its niche may be untenanted for years. The severity of the cliff faces opens up real, if testing, opportunities for the development of variation, and the next seed of the parent species to find a roothold here – perhaps decades in the future – may be subtly different genetically. Sometimes these new variants, given their chance in the isolated nurseries on the cliffs, find their way out into the rocky landscape beyond the gorge.
Down by the portales, where the track narrows to a few yards, the cliffs rise an almost sheer 1,000 feet above you. In early summer the wind can become compressed in the thin tunnels through the rock and create vortices which tear up whole plants and whirl them down to the bottom of the gorge like giant thistledown. Yet there is palpable sense of centrifugal force here, of the gorge walls exerting a kind of lateral gravity. It seems to influence the plants, too. You cannot see this from ground level, but many of the chasmophytes are growing horizontally out of the gorge walls. John Fielding’s photographs for the definitive Flowers of Crete include some taken from perches on the cliff, and show plants – flax, shrubby dianthus, silver knapweed – jutting out from the rock in such defiance of actual gravity and any orthodox leafy attraction to light that you could easily think the pictures have been mistakenly rotated by ninety degrees. Why should this be so? Is it a reflection, an obflection of the powerful penetration their roots must make into the narrow crevices? A way of giving seeds the chance of a wider scatter? Or a consequence of some deep recalibration of the flow of the growth-controlling hormone auxin, alerted that the direction of progress here is sideways?
I think of the way the peculiarities of Samaria are echoed in Crete’s other gorges and beyond, in the labyrinths of hundreds of other Aegean islands, and imagine this whole area as a crucible for the evolution of new plant forms, multiplying in its small cracks in space and time.