Crete is part of me now, for there I changed directions and followed what my heart knew was right but my wallet and academic pre-programming begged to differ. The year was 1974 and I had been disillusioned for some time with my research which was then being pursued just for the sake of it – to finish it. London was home and I bought books as a solace… Some thirty seven years later we have just returned from sharing a love of this island with a lovely group of people..lots of flowers, birds of prey, great food and excellent company. And in that strange way that things happen bits of life link up. Just before I left the world of real jobs in 1986 I was working in a Midlands boarding school, Denstone College where, as a left of centre atheist who can’t play cricket life in a Church of England establishment was… interesting. However I kept getting promoted and ended up as a Housemaster …it turns out that Julia Jones, mother of Matthew one of the first to join as a new boy in Philips House now runs an organisation to promote the Flowers of Crete . I have promised to do what I can to supply images and promote…Crete really is an amazing place for spring flowers and the site is well worth a visit.
Tulipa bakeri - a Cretan endemic from high in the white Moutains
However… in April of 1974 I found cheap flights to Crete and travelled everywhere by bus…having studied maths I knew the Greek alphabet, which was handy and could read the destinations. First stop Phaestos where, arriving in a storm I dumped bags in a tourist pavilion and rushed out to find, in a matter of metres, spikes of the monkey orchid (Orchis simia) and Cretan ophrys (Ophrys cretica)..my Damascene conversion. Sadly, 37 years later that wonderful path has gone…but I found much else and a lengthier account is being prepared.
Giant Fennel (Ferula communis) against rather infrequent blue skies
In Foyles, two years previously, I had found the yellow-covered book that became a beacon – Flowers of the Mediterranean by Anthony Huxley and Oleg Polunin. Little did I suspect that, in a few years time, I would be involved with writing another book (Wild Orchids of Britain & Europe) with input from Anthony. On that train journey to Shadwell in London’s East End I was smitten by the horde of small buzzing faces of the genus Ophrys, those insect mimics that for some years I had been photographing in the UK with no idea of what lay in and around the Mediterranean.
I confess that, for years, my annual escapes to various parts of the Mediterranean region leading trips was an essential relief to another life. Despondency inevitably set in as the plane descended from the bright sun of high altitudes into Gatwick or Heathrow and light levels under clouds dropped. Then the train journey home and memories of fields of flowers kept me going as I became grateful for the sight of a clump of primroses at the trackside…and wondered about the point of it all.
The Cretan Orchid (Ophrys cretica) one glimpse at this, even dripping with rain, and I was hooked all those years ago.
With the Wisteria in full flower and humming with the giant carpenter bees that adore it and our vocal nightingales in full chorus it is nice to come home now. We had been in Crete for about 12 days and my intention had been to blog each day or three and create a kind of diary. Reality is not like that and full days in the field preceded by two to three hours editing (start at 05.00) followed by an hour of the same before dinner and two hours work…after cut into time. Finishing a book is never quite as easy as intended…in fact, I am exhausted with a capita “F”. I shall put up a longer essay on Crete, the changes good and bad…in the next week.
I have said before that this will be the last book I do in this way I mean it now so ebooks here we come: readers of this blog will be the first to know SOON when the initial one is ready.
Another view of that orchid Ophrys cretica
Hi Paul,
I’ve always enjoyed reading the biographies of artists, and while the part of the stories that detail their success is interesting, it is the road to that point that fascinates me the most. I loved the part in this post about the book that you found and how you ended up producing the next edition. It is encouraging to hear exampes of how dilligence can pay off. Sometimes we feel like we’re lost in the desert when, in reality, we’ve been on the right course all along.
My best,
Clay
Hello Clay,
That meeting with Anthony Huxley was a huge break for me – we became great friends but I was rather in awe of him at first. He had no tolerance of fools and quickly let one know when he regarded you in that camp… He had the demeanour of an Oxford or Cambridge tutor – in fact he had read English at Cambridge – it triggered a response in me: that old rocking back and forth in idiocy, sucking my thumb and gazing out the window sort of thing. I was just 29 when we started the work and he more than double my age. Anthony was understandably proud of the Huxley name (being son of zoologist Sir Julian, nephew of Aldous and great grandson of Thomas, Darwin’s Bulldog!) and insisted that we used a taxonomy in the orchid book that I truly hated. Flora Europea vol V had just come out and Prof Soo, a Hungarian who had not left his country for decades, did it all from herbarium specimens: Anthony told me that to discard it would be an act of arrogance…I later took a few brickbats since I had written 98% of it all.
Later, Anthony wanted to re-do Flowers of the Med and have me illustrate it but publishing costs had soared by then…I still have much of the preparatory work for a pair of volumes on the Med (West and East) and also an abandoned monograph on the genus Ophrys. Usually people work up to a major volume (which Wild Orchids became) I did that first and subsequently worked downwards. Funny thing is that I would never have written a physics book (though I contributed to a text book or two…) because I knew how much I did not know. So it was a case of “Fools rush in” but I worked at it and learned..in fact most serious botanists I know started at something else. Underneath it all runs the passion of a bit of a serious botanist… I try not to let it show until I see, hear or otherwise sense the BS! Life is too short for the nerdiness involved.
Paul
Paul
Hi Paul,
It’s a small world! Denstone College has been my weekly 5-a-side football haunt for the last 2 years. You don’t happen to have a portrait as Housemaster hung in some ambient lighting somewhere, do you?
Chris
Chris,
These links seem to happen so very often now…little ends tied and knotted. Fortunately, that portrait does not exist, as far as I know. I was there from 1981 – 85 and a young housemaster for three of those years. I did not go to a boarding school – mine was ‘public’ in the truest sense and I think that those who have done take better to the introverted, almost incestuous atmosphere that these isolated communities engender. Some of the people attracted to such institutions could not survive in any real world…I began to feel that I was the abnormal one for wanting to get out! After I left I kept up contact with a few people and went back just once to the funeral of an ex-colleague. One moves on, thank goodness…I still keep in touch with some of my ex-students, the ‘naughty’ ones, the rebels are always the most interesting and closer to being kindred spirits.
Paul