A tour around the grounds

Now then, as you have been so loyal in reading my updates and Village Views I thought it high time that I invited you in for a tour of the house and grounds. Grounds may be a slightly overenthusiastic word to use but there you go. Just so you can get the setting it’s November 28th, the sun is shining though it’s a little chilly in the shadows, and there’s a thin haze covering the mountain that filters the sun and gives the island a calm and quiet atmosphere.

So here we are at the front gates. I shan’t tell you exactly where the house stands as we want to discourage hoards of well wishers and pilgrims from flocking here with a view to ‘touching the hem’ and ‘catching a glimpse’ of us in the wild. But it is situated not far from the ‘American’ supermarket (which is not American) and the ‘German’ bakery, (which is not German). Let’s just say we are in the middle of the village.

Entering the front gates we find ourselves in the downstairs lobby with our landlord’s apothiki (that’s store room to you) to the left. The downstairs lobby holds mainly technical equipment necessary for life on Symi. The water meter and stop cock, the electricity box and meter and little used gardening paraphernalia. Down here is also a pile of junk that is one day destined for the rubbish tip. It’s a kind of death row for broken chairs, cardboard boxes and garden debris and we won’t stay here long. It’s a sadistic trait of our house that, having climbed the four hundred odd steps from the harbour, one then has another ten, slightly too high, steps to pant up before reaching the level on which the habited part of the house resides. At the top of these we double back to stand on the ‘terrace’ which is built over the lobby. From here we can admire the view of Turkey, the sea, part of Nimos island, the neighbour’s washing line and a cat’s cradle of ubiquitous wires that hang from telegraph poles. On the waste ground in front of us we also have an olive tree, a stray cats’ playground and, from time to time, goats.

Having noted the view we turn and notice that the front door is beside us. The house was, according to Nikos (husband of Taverna Zoi) who was brought up here, a typical Symi house with two rooms up and one and a sterna down. This front door leads into the old salon (drawing room) but we’re going to tour the grounds first and enter the house later so we ignore the door for now and head along the side of the house towards the back. Where we reach the front door – this is Symi after all – which is the door we use to come and go through on an everyday basis. But more later. First we’ll climb another five steps and enter upon the garden.

Garden is not an over ambitious words to use though the garden is an over ambitious place. Neither of us are gardeners and, as we’re not allowed to concrete it all over, we’ve taken to cultivating a luxurious variety of exotic weeds for most of the year. I like to think of the garden as lying fallow like a field in some four crop rotating agricultural system. Having said that there are parts of it where things grow. For example, let me introduce you to the three pepper plants I have raised from seed. They somehow survive their south facing location, raging summer sun and the forgetful gardener who is tight with the watering can and produce pretty white flowers followed by tiny green peppers. Beside them lives the smallest of the three lemon trees, so this area is kind of the nursery school department. But just beyond, in the corner by the compost heap Paul made for us out of a discarded oil drum, we have the two plum trees and the apricot. The plums always grow so high we can only ever reach a few a year but the apricot is the most punctual of fruiters. June 15th is normally the first day that the apricots start to fall and we get involved in a mad scramble to pick them before they hit the ground and commit mass Hari-Kari in a colourful display of splattering that the wasps queue up to pick over. After two weeks of our rescue mission and the tree’s attempts at mass crop suicide all the apricots are gone. Either back to Mother Nature, into Marj’s home made jam or to the homes of friends and neighbours.

Next to the mentally unstable (but reliable) Apricot tree is the medium sized lemon tree. This one has a habit of only producing one or two lemons a year but as they are the size of hand grenades we’ll say no more about it. Next in line stands the orange tree. Or I should say ‘squats’ the orange tree. It’s rather stocky and takes all year to produce oranges that are only edible when cooked or pulped into marmalade. It redeems itself by producing nice smelling flowers in celebration of my birthday each year though so we shouldn’t be too hard on it. Finally, at the end of the line, is the big lemon tree. This one produces loads of lemons ranging in size from ping-pong ball to tennis ball depending on how much water we lavish on it in the summer. Behind all these arboreal misfits are two wayward vines that dedicate their lives to creeping around at the back wall and strangling the trees when they think no one is looking. We generally do something about them when they start encroaching on the washing line and we know when it’s time to bring the laundry in because there are leaves growing out of it.

Following the path (now painted grey rather than bare concrete as I had some grey paint and five minutes spare one day) towards the back of the house we pass the bougainvillea that’s never quite achieved the status it deserves and remains constantly stunted. Then the rose bush-come-giant redwood tree that constantly flowers, drops leaves and petals and needs culling every couple of months. We have, beside this, a small gathering of mint and a fern that must have come on holiday from some tropical dwelling place and liked it so much it stayed, it’s totally out of place. And, what’s more surprising, is that it lives side by side with the two vines that act as shade over the back/front door below.

Vines always deserve a special mention as they are so useful and yet so complicated. Basically they sprout leaves and sixteen miles of new… well vine I guess, every year and quite frankly they don’t care in which direction they develop. The water pump up on the roof was nearly smothered this year and we had to machete our way up the stairs to the garden on many occasions. Every two years they give us grapes, so many grapes that we’d never eat them all. (Don’t ask why we don’t make wine the answer is simple: it’s cheaper, quicker, less complicated and probably better tasting to buy it at €2.00 a litre in the shop.) Besides, most of the grapes grow in places that you can’t reach and all kinds of bugs live up there with them. Great green uncoordinated caterpillars that drop off and explode on impact; an alarming diversity of beetle; birds and even cats have been known to make a home up there. And in autumn when the grapes start to go off well, it’s a constant rain storm of fruit, pips and other detritus that the hornets chuck out while getting merrily pissed on the fermenting fruit. These hornets live a very debauched life. They fuss around the rotting grapes all day until late afternoon when, completely smashed on the juice, they can’t even keep themselves upright let alone airborne. We on the other hand live under constant fear of attack from bleary eyed wasps who can’t focus and just blunder about outside the front/back door waiting to be trodden on by someone with bare feet. But all said and done we do get some grapes from the vine before the hornets move in, you can use the leaves for dolmades if you’re so inclined, it gives shade in the summer and kindling for the fire in the winter and it helps fill some space on these pages.

Meanwhile back in the garden: just before we reach the steps (we’re heading along the side of the house but up a level in the garden here) we have a rosemary bush the size of a small country that blocks out all the light from the window it completely covers. We have an annual hacking down which only strengthens its resolve and it comes back extremely quickly and at twice the size. But it does taste good roasted with potatoes. Once we’ve reached the steps which lead up to the flat roof and chopped our way through the rosemary on one side and the lemon tree on the other, we mount a few steps and we’re on top of the bathroom. There’s a wide expanse of flat roof up here with a Heath Robinson kind of pipe work arrangement that meanders around aimlessly until it finds the water pump. These pipes carry water from the sterna to the taps and act as an energy saving alarm clock: You know when summer is coming because the cold water they carry comes out of the pipes hot and we hardly need to use the internal water heater. From the flat roof we get a view of the Vigla, our mountain behind us, the church of Thanasis a little way to the west, then the Castro and over to the East is the Pedi valley and bay.