Walking Through the Olive Groves

  And a lizard.

Readers of the blog will know that we find a variety of livestock in the empty swimming pool behind our rented house.  What you may not know is that Al (of Assisi) is a keen rescuer.  Yesterday morning amongst the usual haul of centipedes and beetles, there was a lizard.  We gave it a chance to use the sunbed escape route, but this was declined.  So Al chased it down after only 2 circuits of the pool.

Sorry, lizard hard to spot, but believe me, it is poking its head out of Al's hand.  So bright I couldn't see the iPhone screen, so had to point and shoot.  Successfully liberated, intact with tail.

Now, here's my dilemma.  I don't want this to turn into a brag-a-blog about how lucky we are to be here etc etc but all the same I know there are some huge fans of Crete out there, and you like to see the photos and hear more about our environment.  So I am going to continue to post photos and descriptions on the understanding that we appreciate our good fortune, but we still have to face the future like everyone else.  Death and taxes, hopefully not in that order.

     

One of the unintended consequences of the lockdown in Marediana is that we get to explore the local walks, instead of getting in the car to go to the mountains, or the beach. These walks almost always involve starting or finishing in an olive grove, or, more precisely, a track through one.  In this laid back envronment, there is not a whiff of a challenge from 'locals'.  There are tracks everywhere for access during the olive harvest, usually bordered by wild flowers, grasses and badger sets.  We feel completely free to wander where we like, even into the olive groves themselves. They will be cool in the height of summer.

Apparently the most recent olive harvest was very poor, but I have high hopes for the next one.  The tree growth looks really healthy, and the olive blossom is coming out now.  This is very modest - not at all showey. 

Olives are an amazing and almost sacred gift.  The oil - so rich and precious and extracted from such unpromising land, often steep, or carved into terraces.  


 
The trees themselves go from tiny saplings to ancient distorted trunks, with deeply scored bark.  They are often pruned quite severely, and we burn the by-product in our fireplace.

 

 


Olive trees in the landscape and close up are amazing.  If you look on Google maps satellite view, they always seem to be planted in rows, but few groves really look like this.

Close up the leaves are green in some aspects, grey in others.  When the wind moves the branches there is a silvery, serpentine beauty to them. Hard to capture, even on video.  





Coming soon: interior life in lockdown