On 27/9/07 19:00, in article
, "Dave Poole"
wrote:


Glad to hear you both enjoyed your holiday. I must try Turkey
sometime, though the next trip will be back to Cyprus.
snip
To expand on this but in a different direction, I have never seen any of the
plants you identified (other than P. tobira) in Cyprus but the conditions
must be as close as makes no difference I would imagine.
The hotel garden had been lovingly planted but by someone selling an awful
lot of plants to someone who wasn't sure what he really needed! In one
really quite small circle it was possible to see Hibiscus, Albizia
julibrissin and Cercis siliquastrum all struggling for nourishment and that
was a recurring theme. The soil was thin and poor and if there are any
worms in it, we certainly didn't see one. The gardener, who is just a bit
over-stretched, is also the pool man and occasionally mans the boat too. He
agreed with Ray that it needs a good deal of what he called "mooooooo" as he
held his nose, dug into it. ;-) There was a very pretty little
Lampranthus type with a bright pink double flower, very attractive to bees,
doing wonderfully in sunny spots and then straggling miserably in shady
ones. Skimmias were dying almost as we watched them but mercifully, there
were only two or three. Even Bougainvillea, which was a real joy to look
at, wasn't as far advanced in 3 years as we would have expected in that
climate. Aeoniums planted in bright corners were being watered daily and
were utterly miserable. OTOH, pomegranates verged on rampaging as were lime
trees. Some of the pomegranates were ripe to the point of splitting, others
were obviously young fruits so I imagine they develop fruit almost all the
year round there? One had a lovely double, white and orangey flower. Most
of the garden was lovely and full of colour but I suppose that we noticed
bits and pieces many would have overlooked if not taking a sort of busman's
holiday interest. ;-)
On one evening we were in a garden where they were spraying some smelly pale
yellow powder all along the garden's border with the river. We were
appalled and asked what it was and were assured it was a harmless mosquito
killer. But the barman covered our glasses while telling us it would do us
no harm. Huh?! Ray and another chap there said it reminded them of DDT but
I believe that is now banned in Turkey, so does anyone have any idea what is
now used against mosquitoes in that country?

--
Sacha
http://www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove weeds from address)
'We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our
children.'