The almonds here, which at present are blanketed in blossom, may be the most colourful crop-bearing trees in this part of mainland Greece. For sound, however, the olives win hands down. The groves surround every Maniot village and are more full of winter migrants – many of them summer birds further north – than any habitat I’ve encountered in Europe.
Every line of trees holds dozens: blackcaps, song thrushes with chiffchaffs and black redstarts. A tiered grove harbours hundreds; a hillside brims with thousands. While none of them probably nest here, they’re all starting to sing, if not full song then a kind of experimental pre-season rehearsal for the moment they occupy true breeding places. It is vigorous but cacophonous, and in one glorious moment, when I breasted a hillslope near Exochori village, up it blasted like a choral wind full of motes of fluted, warbling and harsher “takking” sounds, and it felt like spring made both audible and palpable.
Yet that wasn’t the most powerful encounter in this landscape. That honour goes to the flowers, whose colours fountain up from every roadside verge, bank and grove. It is spring expressed as a universal but casual chromatic abundance – the sort of thing Britain now hardly knows.
If I had to name the key constituents of the colour chaos, I’d suggest the deep pink of some cranesbill species, often in a wider white or yellow matrix comprised of various kinds of daisy. It is interesting to note that they are richest in the smallest fields – fields so stony, so strewn with limestone shards that the field’s main purpose is not to house stock or serve agricultural roles, but merely to arrange rocks in neater quadrilateral patterns.
The indisputable star of these stone-scapes – and it often ran in constellations through the wider galaxy of colour – is the peacock anemone. Each is a sphere of crimson centred with a lighter straw tone, then an inner iris of pure black stamens. Every one is a treat. Fields of them are pure joy. The quote of the holiday has come from my wife, Mary, who called them “the song of spring in the Mani”.
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