My neighbours’ window boxes

 

Around the corner from my house there are two houses side by side: the first, which faces onto 13 Nisan Caddesi, one of the three  main thoroughfares of the old town, is one of the grander stone houses of Ayvalik. It is three storeys high, tall and thin in the classic Ayvalik manner, with an enormous, elaborately carved stone doorway, and an overhanging top storey. Many of my neighbours, renting the smaller, more ramshackle houses in the narrower sokaks, are villagers from the impoverished south east of Turkey who have migrated to the more prosperous west in hope of a better life;  the owner of this house, however, is more likely to be from Istanbul or Ankara, as are many of the owners of the larger restored Ottoman Greek houses in Ayvalik.

The house  has been immaculately restored, and in the summer pink and red trailing pelargoniums cascade down from its wrought iron balconies:

 

The second house, nestled up against the side of the first around the corner in the side street, is a tiny two-up two-down cottage, with a small walled yard:

It is lived in by a jobbing builder, his Azerbaijani wife, and their little son, a delightful child of unusually angelic disposition in an area teeming with feral infants. Here, although the opportunities for floral display are more limited,  my neighbour engages in some creative container gardening on top of the yard wall:

At the front of the house she only has room for a single window box, but it is quite beautiful, as is her enigmatic smile, glimpsed behind the flowers and wrought iron.

Walking on wild flowers

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here on the Camel Barn Library, and many people have asked me in the last few months, with varying levels of impatience, if I am EVER going to finish the saga of the Paraschos house, and finally satisfy everyone’s curiosity by giving them a look inside it.

Please accept my apologies, patient – and not so patient – readers. I am well aware of how annoying it is when a story stops abruptly, without finishing, and my only explanation is that life got away from me, rather, during the autumn and winter and so, by extension, did the blog.  But now it’s spring-time in the Aegean, and time to get going again with the blog, and much else. I will be returning to the subject of the Paraschos house shortly, but to celebrate restarting the Camel Barn Library, and to remind both myself and you just why I love this place so much, today’s post  is simply about walking in, and on, the wild flowers which cover the wooded hills around Ayvalik at this time of year.

Ayvalik is both built on and surrounded by hills, and if we walk straight up the steep sokaks (alleys) which lie behind the Camel Barn – no inconsiderable feat for me, though less so for my dog Freddie, who likes nothing better than bounding his way uphill on a brisk vertical run, preferably in pursuit of a motorbike – we can be in the woods in less than 10 minutes. The trees are mostly the graceful Mediterranean umbrella pines that grow throughout Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Levant.

The pines maintain their vivid greenness throughout the year, which is particularly welcome in the intensely hot, dry summer months, when all the undergrowth dries up and the ground becomes uniformly dun-coloured; at this time of year, however, the grasses are green and flourishing and so are many species of wild flowers, notable amongst them lavender and dog roses, endless acres of which cover the rocky ground in between the trees:

Although all the woods around Ayvalik are lovely, the areas closest to the town are sadly marred by litter, and fly-tipping. People here don’t, on the whole, use the woods for walking, running, or dog-walking; in the warm months they come to the woods by car or motor-bike, and leave behind them a constantly replenished tide of broken bottles, cigarette packets, plastic bags and other detritus. Builders also frequently dump piles of building rubble by the road going through the woods, even though the town tip is only a five minute drive away:

The constant desecration of a place of such astonishing natural beauty makes me want to weep; this is a problem that is found throughout Turkey, and not just in Ayvalik, and also of course in Europe, although I’ve never seen it on such a large scale anywhere else. The town council recently put up a couple of notices on the road that winds through the woods, forbidding the dumping of rubbish; the very next day I saw, walking past, that someone had neatly deposited a heap of building rubble just underneath one of the new notices.  A few days later, approaching the same spot, I saw black smoke billowing into the air: someone had tipped an old sofa down the hillside, and set fire to it.

However, if you walk far enough through the woods, away from the town, you eventually get further than people can be bothered to go to drink beer, or dump their rubbish; you can then walk for miles over the hills along unmade fire roads, free of human detritus, and the only people you are likely to encounter are beekeepers. The Ayvalik area is famous for its pine and wildflower honey, and throughout the woods are neat lines of beehives, each weighted down with a stone to prevent its lid being blown away by the frequent high winds.

The beekeepers can be found, occasionally, tending to their hives, dressed in their slightly spooky beekeeping outfits, with veils attached to wide-brimmed white hats.

Apart from the beekeepers, no one else much seems to frequent the more remote parts of the woods, except me and Freddie. The  only sounds are the wind, sighing through the pine trees, the occasional buzzing of the bees, and the scrabbling of Freddie’s paws as he excavates yet another hole amongst the flowers:

The further you go, and the higher you get, the more wild flowers there are, and after about 90 minutes’ walking there is a wide, steep track, climbing to a high point from where you can look inland towards the mountains, and out across the sea. This track  is, for a couple of weeks a year, completely carpeted in purple flowers:

 

By the time we get to the top of the purple flowery road, Freddie and I will have been walking for a couple of hours, and are ready to take a rest on the summit of the hill, from where we can look out over the Aegean to the islands of the archipelago, and back across the hills to Ayvalik (which you can see just to the right of Freddie’s head in the photo):

It’s a long walk home, but during April and May we walk this way as often as possible; it’s always beautiful in the hills around Ayvalik, but when the wild flowers are blooming in such spectacular abundance, the beauty is quite overwhelming.  It seems strange that so few people walk in the hills, or see the flowers, but in 3 years of regular walking through these woods, we have met only a handful of people. It’s rather like having our own private National Park…

To my shame, I am unable to give a name to most of the many different species of flowers which are currently blooming here, beyond the obvious lavender, dog roses, daisies and poppies; next year I will have to buy a field guide to the flora of Asia Minor, and see how many different flowers I can identify, but to give you an idea of their variety, the picture below shows a small bouquet I gathered last week for a friend whose health currently prevents her from walking in the hills  - and yes, I know that in the UK you’re not meant to pick wild flowers, but here there are, quite possibly, millions of them, mostly blushing unseen. I feel extraordinarily fortunate to be able to spend so much time walking through the flowers, marvelling at their beauty, and immersing myself in the deep, deep quiet of the woods.