Greek horticulturist Eleftherios Dariotis is something of a rarity. His native country has the richest flora in Europe – more than 6,000 species with around 12 per cent endemic – but as a passionate plantsman he finds himself among only a handful of Greeks actively collecting and growing plants. Over the past 15 years he has built up a collection of more than 5,000 plant taxa. And he’s a man with a mission: to demonstrate the inspirational possibilities of dry-climate gardening by expanding the range and availability of drought-tolerant, Mediterranean-climate plants.
Eleftherios grew up in Peania on the Mesogeia plain, just outside Athens, famed for its olive groves and vineyards. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have access to a garden,” he says. Aged nine, he was already experimenting with growing bulbs in pots. “My grandfather was very influential – he kept bees in the floristically rich foothills of Mount Pateras and Geraneia in eastern Attica. I used to love hanging around with him while he cared for the bees. He would point out and name the flowers bees were visiting, so from a young age I was observing plants in the wild.”
"I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have access to a garden"
Eleftherios studied horticulture in Greece, but it was the opportunity to continue his studies in California with an MSc in plant biology at UC Davis that really rocked his world. “I remember cycling in on my first day and seeing a huge shrub covered with red flowers, swarming with hummingbirds – I took a piece home and it turned out to be the pineapple sage, Salvia elegans. I was bowled over by how different it was to the sage (Salvia fruticosa) I knew from home, and with it a sudden realisation there were hundreds of Salvia species out there.”
Later, while studying for an MSc in horticulture at the University of Reading, he was able to explore the western Mediterranean – Portugal, Spain, as well as the Canary Islands and Madeira. Succulent euphorbias in the wild properly awoke him to the garden value of Mediterranean natives. Up until that point, he had seen the lack of summer flowers as a barrier to using Greek flora in gardens, but he now began to appreciate their form, structure and seedheads. Eleftherios’ plant interests are wide-ranging – he has a deep love for everything in the Lamiaceae family – but the more he discovers, the harder it is to pinpoint any one plant group.
"It will take another 15 years for the dry-gardening movement to take off in Greece"
Back in Greece, various public sector land-management posts came his way, but the call of the wild never left him – at every opportunity he was out botanising, or propagating seeds and bulbs. His reputation as a super knowledgeable plantsman grew, until he was able to leave the day job, concentrating on mail-order seeds and bulbs, leading plant tours and sourcing plant material for university research departments.
With a growing plant collection, it was inevitable that experimental gardens would follow; luckily his family gave him free rein on a couple of plots in Peania. The first, the Goat Garden, is unwatered, and a testing ground for new introductions from the Mediterranean’s driest areas. Passers-by admire it at its spring flowering peak, but by high summer, when Eleftherios has allowed the garden to ‘brown down’, many struggle to understand what they perceive as ‘neglect’. “People can’t believe plants can make it without water,” he says. “I remind them about mountain plants that survive summer dormancy but they can’t quite relate this to a garden where they expect luxuriant green. It will take another 15 years for the dry-gardening movement to truly take off in Greece. Water shortages will be the catalyst.”
"People can’t believe plants can make it without water"
His neighbours find the second, watered, garden more relatable. Here Eleftherios tries out summer flowerers (including his beloved salvias) from other Mediterranean climate zones – mostly California, but also Chile, South Africa and southwest Australia. “Californian plants are particularly well adapted to our climate, with similar rainfall patterns and alkaline soils. Plants such as Epilobium and Keckiella evolved to flower in summer as a food source for hummingbirds, thus providing summer flowering that other Mediterranean plants lack.”
USEFUL INFORMATION Find out more about Eleftherios’s work at mediterraneanseedsandbulbs.com